The Queer Studies Lecture was established in 2014, connected with the development of the queer studies emphasis in the Gender Studies minor. This year’s Queer Studies lecture will be given by Dr. Andrew Donnelly.
Long before the development of queer studies, claims about sexuality have been integral to historical analysis of individuals, events, and phenomena. While this aspect of the human psyche has long been an explanatory tool in biographical analysis of individual motivation, historians have equally drawn on implicit claims about normative and anti-normative behavior, as well as population-level changes in sexual mores, to account for national identity, economic transformation, and political ideology. This lecture, with examples drawn from the historical study of the nineteenth-century U.S., will examine how historians’ understanding of sexuality has shaped their interpretation of the past. The historical interpretation of the Civil War, from the decades after the war through the twenty-first century, has depended, in particular and in consequential ways, upon how historians think about sexuality.
About Dr. Connelly:
Andrew Donnelly is a literary and cultural historian specializing in the periods of the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction and in the field of Southern Studies. He is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Memphis. He received his PhD from the English Department at Harvard University in 2020. His work has been supported by research fellowships from the Boston Athenaeum, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Center for Mark Twain Studies, and the Library Company of Philadelphia. He has been working with the Freedom Project Network in Mississippi for more than a decade, developing a program that brings PhD students and university faculty to teach summer college-bridge courses for high school students at the Freedom Projects in Mississippi. Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Mellon/ACLS Public Fellows program, serving as education programs manager for the National Book Foundation and a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Mississippi in English and Southern Studies.