Queer Print Cultures

This lecture will consider what printed materials and the traces of queer print use can tell us about the history of gendered and sexual embodiment, as well as how books interact with us and with each other. Our discussion will feature people whose work has been typically excluded from the mainstream book trade and academic institutions due to gender, sexuality, race, or class—people who have found alternative venues in which to debate, document, and archive queer experience and their struggles for freedom. We will share how queer people have used materials such as science fiction, romance novels, cutout albums, pornographic zines, classified advertisements, posters, and pamphlets to describe queer sexuality and desire and to raise important questions about identity, kinship, and citizenship.

When? May 28, 2024, 4:15pm
Where? ES 203 (Johannisstr. 12-20)

This event is co-organized with the Chair of Book Studies at the English Department.

Biographical Information

Vance Byrd is a Presidential Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on print culture and visual culture since the late eighteenth century. In addition to numerous articles and A Pedagogy of Observation: Nineteenth-Century Panoramas, German Literature, and Reading Culture, Byrd has co-edited three books and two journal issues. He is working on a second monograph, Listening to Panoramas: Sonic and Visual Cultures of Commemoration. His research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, Fulbright, and the Getty Research Institute.

Javier Samper Vendrell is Assistant Professor of German Studies and core faculty in the Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on LGBTQ+ history, film, literature, and print culture in the early twentieth century. His book The Seduction of Youth: Print Culture and Homosexual Rights in the Weimar Republic was published the University of Toronto Press in 2020. He is currently working on a second monograph, Fear of the Bogeyman: Children, Queerness, and Monsters in German Culture.