About Seminars in the City
Current Seminar
Past Seminars

For the 2009/2010 academic year, the Seminars in the City will be sponsored by the International Resource network, focusing on the theme of sexuality and human rights around the world. The series reflects CLAGS and IRN’s shared commitment to providing a public forum for intellectual discussion and debate within and beyond the academy by connecting academics, activists, and the larger community around the world to share information and resources in sexuality studies. Since the IRN is organized by geopolitical regions, each seminar will focus on questions of sexual human rights in specific regions around the world.

September 14
Reframing Queer Sexualities in the Middle East
Presenter: Serkan Gorkemli, English Department, University of Connecticut, Stamford

October 5
Neither Heaven Nor Hell:
The Realities of Sexual Minority Organizing in the Caribbean

Presenters: Rosamond S. King, English Department, Brooklyn College; Angelique Nixon, Department of Social & Cutltural Analysis, New York University

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center
208 West 13th Street
New York, NY 10011

ASL interpretation can be provided for any CLAGS event if requested 10 or more working days prior to the event.
If you have other accessibility needs, please contact the CLAGS office, with a relay operator when necessary.

Seminars in the City is sponsored by the International Resource Network.

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In a partnership with The Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center, the monthly series offers an informal but intellectually charged environment for addressing major works of LGTBQ studies. The aim is to make complex and often abstruse ideas engaging for nonacademic readers. Previous Seminars leaders, themselves CLAGS board members, have found the Seminars experience "a delight." Anne Pellegrini, who taught "Introduction to Queer Theory" in the fall of 1998 recalls that, "the experience was a powerful and pleasurable reminder of the vital links possible between the academy and the streets, theory and living."

Elizabeth Freeman, who is a former CLAGS Board Member and the first organizer of the series, is proud of its success so far. Freeman says that the many semesters have generated a great deal of excitement, and the conversations in the seminars have been provocative, spirited, and insightful. "The success has already given us a sense of the intellectual, political, and artistic energy that thinkers outside the academy contribute to our shared inquiry," says Freeman. Each semester centers around a particular theme and is led by a CLAGS Board member with an expertise in the field.

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