American Antiquarian Society
185 Salisbury Street
Worcester, MA 01609
United States
This week-long seminar offers an archivally-based and hands-on introduction to histories of gender and sexuality between the colonial period and 1865, exploring how each of these formations were shaped, negotiated, disciplined, and incentivized by print technologies and the cultures that emerged around them. Participants will use the extraordinary collections of the AAS to consider important critical and theoretical questions that early Americanist scholars of gender and sexual cultures continue to ask of their archives. Specific topics will be guided by participants’ interests but may include: histories of gender nonconformity and transness; slavery and the history of sexuality; the racialization of gender; sex work; privacy; and pornography.
Each day of the seminar will explore key conceptual and methodological issues in conversation with major sites of inquiry and a range of archival materials which speak to these concerns. For example, one unit will be dedicated to influential work on the histories of slavery, focusing on how the archive has been used to recover same-sex desire and attraction over time. More recent scholarship, however, looks to other print and manuscript sources to problematize these understandings of same-sex relations. Taking account of such debates, the seminar will consider how engaging with exemplary materials in the AAS collections can respond to these concerns and point towards new directions in the study of sex, gender, and print.
Readings will be drawn from both foundational and current scholarship on early American gender and sexuality, while time spent with the AAS collections will allow participants to reevaluate the evidence on which all such scholarship is based––and to consider other sources that may further advance these conversations. By immersing participants in a variety of gendered and sexualized cultures of print, our aim will be to revisit a series of important questions and problems, to bring new scholars into these conversations, and to reinvigorate topics we thought had been exhausted by reading the archive alongside the most exciting scholarly directions in our own moment. Interdisciplinary in approach, we welcome emerging and established scholars from multiple fields and disciplinary backgrounds, including English, History, African American studies, queer and trans studies, religious studies, visual and material culture, the history of the book, and more.
“Sex, Gender, and Print” also coincides with the James Russell Wiggins Lecture in the History of the Book in American Culture, which will be given by Christopher Looby (University of California, Los Angeles) on June 11, 2025.
Syllabus
The syllabus will be available in the spring. Online access to the seminar readings will be provided to admitted participants.
About
Participation is intended for graduate students, college and university faculty, librarians and museum professionals, and other interested researchers.
Accessibility
PHBAC is committed to creating an environment that welcomes all people and meets their access needs. The AAS library and classroom facilities are wheelchair accessible. Other accommodations may be available upon advance request. Participants are encouraged to indicate any accessibility needs in their applications.
Application
The deadline for applications is April 4, 2025.
Cost
Tuition for the seminar is $800, which includes lunch each day, light morning refreshments, and two evening meals. Several tuition scholarships to attend the seminar will be available for early career scholars and graduate students, including two full tuition scholarships generously funded by the Bibliographical Society of America. Notification of awards will be sent to recipients after admission to the seminar.
Housing
The cost of housing is not included in the tuition fee. Participants will have the option of staying in dormitory housing on the Worcester Polytechnic Institute campus (within easy walking distance of AAS) for approximately $77.00 per night.
Contact
For questions about the seminar, contact John J. Garcia, AAS director of scholarly programs and partnerships, at jgarcia [at] mwa.org or 508-471-2134.
Jordan Alexander Stein is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Affiliated Faculty in African and African American Studies at Fordham University. His research investigates how aspects of social identities (including race, sexuality, gender, and religion) inflect the material practices associated with literary production (including reading, printing, editing, and archiving). These interests shape his prize-winning collection, Early African American Print Culture, co-edited with Lara Langer Cohen (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), and his monograph, When Novels Were Books (Harvard University Press, 2020). Other recent projects include Fantasies of Nina Simone (Duke University Press, 2024) and the forthcoming special issue of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies on “Melville’s Queer Afterlives,” co-edited with Adam Fales and Dana Seitler. He was elected to AAS membership in 2023.
Greta LaFleur is Associate Professor of American Studies and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. LaFleur’s research and teaching focuses on early North American literary and cultural studies, the history of science, the history of race, the history and historiography of sexuality, and queer & trans studies. Her first book, The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America reveals how eighteenth-century race science contributed to emerging sciences of sex in the colonial Atlantic world. They are currently at work on two new projects. The first, tentatively titled How Sex Became Good: The Feminist Movements and Racial Politics that Made Modern Sexuality (under contract with University of Chicago Press), tracks how cultural and legal responses to the problem of sexual violence shaped the politicization of sexuality in the modern period. The second is a co-authored book of essays, authored with anthropologist Cal Biruk, on birding, currently under final review with the Practices series at Duke University Press. LaFleur is also editor of Trans Historical: Gender Plurality Before the Modern (with Masha Raskolnikov and Anna Klosowska), and American Literature in Transition, 1770-1828 (with William Huntting Howell). They are also the series editor, with Blake Gutt and Emily Skidmore, of the six-volume A Cultural History of Trans Lives, under contract with Bloomsbury Publishing.