Supporters
Mission
The Center for Lesbian and Gay
Studies (CLAGS) was founded in 1991 as the first university-based research
center in the United States dedicated to the study of historical,
cultural, and political issues of vital concern to lesbian, gay,
bisexual, and transgender individuals and communities. By sponsoring public programs
and conferences, offering fellowships to individual scholars, and
functioning as an indispensable conduit of information, CLAGS serves
as a national center for the promotion of scholarship that fosters
social change.
Directions & Hours
CLAGS is located in room 7115 of the Graduate Center of the
City University of New York, 365 Fifth Avenue between 34th/35th Streets.
The Graduate Center is easy walking distance from these subway lines:
B,D,F,V,N,Q,R,W at 34th St/Herald Square
1,2,3 at 34th St
6 at 33rd St.
CLAGS is generally open Mon-Fri from 11am-5pm. If you are making a special trip, we recommend calling ahead: 212.817.1955.
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Executive Director:
Sarah E. Chinn is an Associate Professor in the English Department at
Hunter College. She is the author of Technology and the Logic of American Racism: A Cultural History of the Body as Evidence (2000), and
New Americans, New Identities: The Children of Immigrants and the Invention of Modern Adolescence, 1885-1930 (forthcoming, Rutgers
University Press). She has also published numerous articles in American Studies, Queer Studies, and Disability Studies, including
"Feeling Her Way: Audre Lorde and the Power of Touch," and "'Something Primitive and Age-Old as Nature Herself': Lesbian Sexuality and the
Permission of the Exotic."
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Founder:
Martin Duberman is Distinguished Professor of History at Lehman College and the Graduate
Center of the City University of New York, and the founder and
first Director (1986-96) of the Center for Lesbian and Gay
Studies. One of the country's foremost historians, he is the
author of 19 books and numerous articles and essays. He won the
Bancroft Prize for Charles Francis Adams; two Lambda awards
for Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past,
an anthology he co-edited; and a special award from the National
Academy of Arts and Letters for his "contributions to
literature." His play, In White America, won the
Vernon Rice/Drama Desk Award. His most current play, Visions of
Kerouac, will be produced in May 2003 at the Marin Theater
Company. His other works include James Russell Lowell, Black
Mountain: An Exploration in Community, Paul Robeson, Cures:
A Gay Man's Odyssey, and Stonewall. He just completed a
novel, Haymarket and has recently begun a biography of
Lincoln Kirstein.
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Board of Directors,
2006-2007:
Deborah P. Amory is Dean and Director of the Central New York
Center of Empire State College, SUNY.
She has presented on gay globalization using her research on a group
of urban gay kuchu men in Kenya in CLAGS's colloquium
series (see CLAGSNews Summer 2000 issue for a report).
She developed with CLAGS board member Esther Newton
an on-line version of CLAGS's Seminars in the City
discussion group.
Luis E.
Cárcamo-Huechante is an Assistant Professor of Romance
Languages and Literatures at
Harvard University. His research interests are:
intersections
between literary, cultural, and economic discourses in
modern Latin
America; issues of gender, sexuality, and culture; cultural
theory and
critique in the Americas; Latin American poetry and poetic
thought of all
periods. He is currently working on his book project on the
trope of the
market in economic, literary and cultural discourses in late
twentieth-century
Chilean society.
Current
initiative: a
South American Symposium on Sexuality, Gender and Culture.
Kimberly
Christensen is
Associate Professor of Economics and Women's Studies
at SUNY/Purchase, and is the recipient of the SUNY Chancellor's
Award for Distinguished Teaching. Her research focuses on the
intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality in public policy; e.g.,
labor market
discrimination, welfare "reform," and current proposals for reform of
the electoral/campaign finance system. She has been involved in the peace, AIDS, and
disability rights movements, among other political activities, for many years.
Carlos Ulises Decena is Assistant Professor in the
Departments of Women's and Gender Studies and Latino and
Hispanic Caribbean Studies at Rutgers, the State University of
New Jersey.
Rafael de la Dehesa is an Assistant Professor in
the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work at the
College of Staten Island of the City University of New York.
His current research focuses on LGBT social movement activism in
Latin America and on how political parties in the region have
taken up the debates on sexuality.
Carolyn
Dinshaw (on leave 2006) is the
founding Director of the Center for the Study of Gender and
Sexuality at NYU, where she is also Professor of English. A
medievalist by training, she wrote the first full-length feminist
book on Chaucer, Chaucer's Sexual Poetics (1989), followed
by Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and
Postmodern (1999). Her current research concerns late
medieval mysticism and queerness. With David M. Halperin,
she is founding co-editor of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay
Studies, published by Duke University Press.
Jack Drescher, M.D., is a Training and Supervising Analyst at
the William Alanson White Institute, and a Distinguished Fellow of
the American Psychiatric Association (APA). He is Chair of
the APA's Committee on Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Issues and a
founding member of the Group for Advancement of Psychiatry's
Commitee on Sexual Minorities. He is the author of
Psychoanalytic Therapy and the Gay Man (The Analytic Press,
1998), editor of The Analytic Press's "Bending Psychoanalysis"
book series and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Gay and
Lesbian Psychotherapy. Dr. Drescher is in private
practice in New York City.
Thomas Glave is the author of Whose Song? and Other Stories (City Lights), a collection of essays, Words To Our Now: Imagination and Dissent (Minnesota; winner of a 2005 Lambda Literary Award), the forthcoming The Torturer's Wife (fiction; City Lights), and editor of the forthcoming anthology Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles(Duke, 2008).
A founding member of the Jamaica Forum for Lesbians, All-Sexuals, and Gays (J-FLAG), he is an
associate professor of English at SUNY Binghamton.
Yukiko Hanawa teaches in the Department of East Asian
Studies at New York University.
Richard Kim is a Ph.D. candidate in the American Studies program at
New York University. His dissertation on sexuality and 19th
century American travel writing is titled "Fellow Travelers:
Homoeroticism, Orientalism and American Empire." He has
taught at NYU's Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality and in
the Film and Media department at Hunter College. He writes
frequently on sexual politics, AIDS and popular culture for The
Nation magazine and other publications, and is on the board of
directors of Queers for Economic Justice.
Karin Kohlmeier is a student in the PhD program in English at CUNY
and teaches English at City College. She has been appointed
by QUNY, the Graduate Center's queer student organization, to serve
as a student representative on the CLAGS board. Before coming
to CUNY, Karin received her Masters in Humanities and Social
Thought from NYU. Along with GLBTQ studies, her research
interests include autobiography, immigration narratives, and
Victorian literature.
Don Kulick
received his PhD from Stockholm University in Sweden, and currently
works in Anthropology at New York University. He recently conducted
fieldwork among transgender Brazilian prostitutes in Milan, Italy
for his study, "Heterosexuality: An Ethnographic Approach,"
and is currently working on two book manuscripts, Language
and Sexuality (with Deborah Cameron) and Good Sex: Sexuality
& Nation in Sweden.
Christian John
Lillis is the director of major gifts for the National Gay and
Lesbian Task Force, where he oversees the Task Force’s ambitious
Leadership Council program and provides staff support to the
organization’s board of directors fundraising efforts. He joined
to the Task Force in June 2005, after four years at NYU Medical
Center, where he was most recently Associate Director of
Development. He is a former member of the Board of Directors of
the Association of Professional Researchers for Advancement (APRA)
of Greater New York, where he served as Education Services
Director and Program Director. He is a frequent speaker at local
and regional conventions, including the Mid-Atlantic Researchers
Conference (2003, 2004 and 2005), APRA of Greater New York
meetings and New Jersey Fundraising Day.
Yolanda
Martínez-San Miguel is Associate Professor of
Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania.
She has previously taught at Rutgers University, Princeton
University, and at
the University of Puerto Rico. Her research focuses on
Latin(o) American Literature, particularly in Colonial,
Hispanic Caribbean and Latino Narrative and Poetry. Her
courses cover topics ranging from Cultural Representations of
Hispanic Caribbean Migrations to the Invention of a Colonial
Discourse in the Américas.
In the fall of 2000, she presented "Families of Desire: Migration
and Sexuality in New York's Caribbean Enclaves" for CLAGS's
Colloquium Series. She has published two books, Saberes
americanos: subalternidad y epistemología
en los escritos de Sor Juana
(Iberoamericana, 1999), and Caribe Two Ways: cultura de la
migracíon en el Caribe insular hispánico (Callejón, 2003),
and a compilation of essays, co-edited with Mabel Moraña,
Nictimene ...sacrílega. Estudios coloniales en homenaje a
Georgina Sabat-Rivers (Claustro de Sor Juana and
Iberoamericana, 2003).
Lisa Jean Moore has
been a part of the CUNY system since 1998 and teaches courses
such as The Sociology of Women, The Sociology of Men, Birth and
Death and The Sociology of the Body. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of
Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work at CUNY's College of Staten Island
and the Graduate Center. Previously she was a postdoctoral
fellow at the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies in San Francisco,
and she served as the President of the Board of the Sperm Bank of California.
Her publications include research on human genital anatomy, semen,
sperm banks, and male hierarchies.
Ananya Mukherjea
is an Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies and Sociology at the
College of Staten Island of the City University of New York. Her
main area of research is the social politics of infectious disease
pandemics, especially the global history of HIV/AIDS. She’s also
interested in urban public health, more generally, and in feminist
pedagogy. Ananya worked as an HIV/AIDS educator and advocate and
as an anti-prison proliferation activist for several years. She is
currently involved with the many folks working to keep CUNY free
and vibrant and at the forefront of public education.
Colin Robinson
is Executive Director of the New York State Black
Gay Network. A Trinidadian immigrant, Robinson's work in the
U.S. has focused on building organizations (especially LGBT
immigrant and people of color communities), HIV and transnational
policy issues, and cultural production. He created the 2003
publication "Think Again," was New York field producer for the
film "Tongues Untied," an early editor and key administrator for
the serial "Other Countries: Black Gay Voices," and has played
leadership and founding roles in the Audre Lorde Project,
Caribbean Pride, Gay Men of African Descent and the International
Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission. His past CLAGS work
includes planning the 1995 Black Nations/Queer Nations conference
and service as a Rockefeller Fellowship juror.
Joe
Rollins (on leave 2006) is Assistant Professor of Political Science at
Queens College.
David Serlin is an Associate Professor of Communication
and Science Studies and an Affiliated Faculty in Critical Gender
Studies at the University of California, San
Diego. He is the author of Replaceable You: Engineering
the Body in Postwar America (2004) and a co-editor of Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories
of Prosthetics (2002), and Policing Public Sex:
Queer Politics and the Future of AIDS Activism (1996). He serves as
a historical consultant for the National Institutes of Health and
as a member of the Radical History
Review's editorial collective.
Ben.
Sifuentes Jáuregui is Associate Professor of American
Studies and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University. He
is the author of Transvestism, Masculinity, and Latin American
Literature: Genders Share Flesh (Palgrave 2002). His
recent work looks at Latin American melodrama and the structure of
masochism, and queer Latin(o) American identities. He has also taught courses on
Latino/a literatures and post-colonial theory, psychoanalytic theory,
and sexuality.
Dean
Spade
is a trans activist and attorney who
founded the Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP) in August of 2002.
SRLP is a collective organization, providing free legal services
to low-income people and people of color facing gender identity
discrimination. Dean was the recipient of the Emil J.
Stache Public Interest Law Fellowship at UCLA for the years of
1998-2001, when he received his J.D. He is currently a Law
Teaching Fellow of Williams Institute at UCLA Law School. His writing has appeared
in the Chicano-Latino Law Review, the Harvard Lesbian
and Gay Review, and the Berkeley Women's Law Journal.
Dean is also co-editor of the online journal Makezine.org.
Polly Thistlethwaite is an Associate Professor and Associate
Librarian for Public Services at the CUNY Graduate Center.
She has worked extensively with the Lesbian Herstory Archives,
and she was recently awarded a PSC/CUNY Research Grant to study
GLBT public history in Berlin.
Saadia Toor is at the Department of Sociology, Anthropology,
and Social Work at the College of Staten Island of the City
University of New York.
Brenda
Vollman is a student in
the Criminal Justice PhD program of the Graduate Center, at John Jay
College. S/he has been appointed by QUNY,
the
Graduate Center's queer student organization, to serve as a student
representative on the CLAGS board. Brenda has earned a Bachelor of
Arts in Gender Studies, with a concentration in the African
Diaspora, from the Ohio State University(1995). S/he moved to New
York City to attend City College, receiving a Masters in Sociology
(2000). Brenda is on the Steering Committee of the Doctoral
Student Council, and is an active intra-program representative. S/he
is currently an adjunct in the Sociology Department at John Jay
College, teaching courses ranging from Introduction to Sociological
Perspectives, Social Problems, Race and Ethnic Relations and
Feminist Criminology. Brenda’s research interests are structured
around the ways in which race, class, gender, and sexuality
influence perceptions and constructions of violence and
victimization (particularly sexual violence), and the ways in which
social control policies are created and enforced as a result.
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Staff:
Any of the staff members below can be contacted at clags@gc.cuny.edu. For fastest response, include the individual's name in the subject line.
Naveed Alam is the Events and Outreach Coordinator and edits CLAGSNews. He teaches English at John Jay College. His first collection of poems, A Queen of No Ordinary Realms, won the Spokane Poetry Prize and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous magazines including Prairie Shooner, Poetry International, International Poetry Review, The American Poetry Journal, The Marlboro Review, and The Seattle Review.
Preston Bautista
is CLAGS's graphic designer. He is
a doctoral candidate in Art History at the Graduate Center, CUNY.
While writing his dissertation, he is also working as a Program
Assistant at the Getty Foundation.
Naz is the Development Director at CLAGS. She is
pursuing a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology, and is particularly
interested in transnational feminism, immigrant rights, and race
in post-9/11 America.
Alyssa Nitchun is the Membership and Fellowships Coordinator at CLAGS.
She loves dressing up, queer theory, subcultural archives, and exploring
performativity. In pursuit of such things, Alyssa is a freelance writer on art,
fashion, theatre, and music, and an ongoing contributor to downtown NY archives
and a DJ. Alyssa holds an MA in Humanities and Social Thought with an emphasis
in Gender Politics from NYU.
