The ACE Studies Lecture was established in the spring of 2022, to coincide with the Glitterary Festival, a queer literary conference. We subsequently moved this lecture to the fall, to coincide with asexuality week at the end of October.  This year’s ACE Studies Lecture will be delivered by KJ Cerankowski. The title of his talk is "Wanting Nothing or Nothing Wanting? Asexuality, Desire, and the Matter of Absence."

KJ Cerankowski is an interdisciplinary scholar and writer with research interests in asexuality, trauma studies, queer theory, and transgender studies. He is the author of several articles, including the 2021 Symonds Prize-winning essay “The ‘End’ of Orgasm: The Erotics of Durational Pleasures,” published in Studies in Gender and Sexuality. His poetry and prose have been published in DIAGRAM, Pleiades, Entropy, and The Account, among others. He is the coeditor of Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives (Routledge 2014) and the author of Suture: Trauma and Trans Becoming (Punctum 2021).