Dinshaw to Speak on Gender and Queer Studies

Chestertown, MD, April 4, 2001 — Dr. Carolyn Dinshaw, professor of English and director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University, will address the topic "Gender Studies, Queer Studies: Local and Global Perspectives" on Wednesday, April 18, 2001, at 4:30 p.m. in the Sophie Kerr Room of Washington College's Miller Library. Sponsored by the Sophie Kerr Committee, the talk is free and open to the public.

Dr. Dinshaw helped to establish the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality (CSGS) which opened at NYU in the fall of 1999. A medievalist by training, Dr. Dinshaw received her Ph.D. in 1982 from Princeton University. She has taught courses on Chaucer, Middle and early modern English language and literature, European medieval literature, feminist studies and queer studies. She also founded a program in gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender studies at the University of California-Berkeley, where she taught from 1982 to 1999.

Dr. Dinshaw believes that dialogue on the issues of gender and sexuality gains greater complexity and detail when viewed with a long historical lens and she is fascinated by the forms that bodies and pleasures might have taken before they were specifically formulated into modern sexualities in the West. With David M. Halperin, she is founder of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (Duke University Press), the leading scholarly journal in the rapidly expanding field of queer studies. Her current research articulates queer literary-historical studies with the insights of postcolonial studies.