Southampton Stonewall Lecture 2016 Event

'Lesbian Life Stories: Stuck in the Past? On the Archives of Lesbian Oral Testimonies (ALOT)'

This 2016 Stonewall lecture from a leading historian of sexuality and gender will explore and explain lesbian experience as captured in three decades of oral histories. In the 1990s the discipline of history, once a leader in LGBT studies, was overtaken by literary and cultural studies, and 'life experience' fell out of academic fashion. Professor Chenier will show that “lesbian” remains a useful category of analysis and that life stories continue to have a transformative effect, playing a key role in constructing the LGBT community.

Elise Chenier is Professor of History at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, and an expert in the history of sexuality and oral history. Her first book, Strangers In Our Midst: Sexual Deviancy in Postwar Ontario (Toronto, 2008) was awarded an honourable mention for the Canadian Law & Society Book Prize. She has published widely in journals such as the Radical History Review, the Journal of Women's History, and Left History, and is the founder of the Archives of Lesbian Oral Testimony (alotarchives.org), an open-access digital archives, and interracialintimacies.org, a digital visualization of the research process and learning tool. She is currently writing a book on 'Same Sex Marriage in the USA, 1950-1987'.

This lecture will be chaired by Professor Mark Cornwall, Professor of Modern Europe History at University of Southampton.

The inaugural Stonewall Lecture was given in March 2012 by Angela Mason CBE, former executive director of the Stonewall charity. Her lecture, drawing a large audience, was entitled: ‘Twenty-Five Years On: The Fight for LGBT Rights in the UK’. The 2013 lecture 'Gay Culture in Postwar New York: Community Creation and Conflict' was given by Professor George Chauncey (Yale), 2014 was provided by Professor Laura Doan speaking about 'On the Entanglements of Queer Memory and History: The case of Alan Turing' and last year we welcomed Professor Richard B Parkinson from the University of Oxford with his lecture entitled 'Glimpses of a Gay World History: From Ancient Egypt to the Modern Museum'. You will find video and interview re the lectures by following the links above.

There will be a charity collection on behalf of Stonewall at the end of the lecture.

If you wish to attend this very popular lecture please book your place before 12:00 on 18 February by emailing tps@southampton.ac.uk