Henry J. Leir Chair Programming

This is an overview, for more detailed accounts, go to the year-by-year buttons.

Susana Antunes (University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee), “Portugal an the National Imagination,” May, 2021

Velma Pollard (Jamaican Poet), co-sponsored talk in Prof. Ferly’s seminar on Caribbean Women Writers, April, 2021.

Patricia Layne (University of North Carolina): “Afro-German Writing Today: Olivia Wenzel’s 1000 Coils of Fear,” March 2021

Lecture Series on German-Jewish Culture and Modern Multiculturalism

Tiffany N. Florvil (University of New Mexico): “Mobilizing Black Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement,” February 2021.
Hana Green (Clark University): “Passing as Aryan: Female Jewish Identity during the Holocaust,” January 2021
Marc David Baer (London School of Economics): “German, Jew, Muslim, Gay: The Life and Time of Hugo Marcus,” January, 2021
Frances Tanzer (Clark University): “The Habsburg Empire and the Jews,” January, 2021.
Andreas Krass (Humboldt University, Berlin): “Magnus Hirschfeld in Palestine,” January, 2021
Elisabeth Imber (Clark University): “Theodor Herzl,” January, 2021
Liliane Weissberg (University of Pennsylvania): “Benjamin Veitel Ephraim: The Life and Work of Jewish Merchant, Writer, and Spy in Late Eighteenth Century Berlin,” January, 2021

Faculty Colloquium on the Report of the Commission on Unalienable Rights, December 2020

David Tse-Chien Pan (University of California, Irvine).
Christian Emden (Rice University)

#Faust4Now, November 2020

Todd Kontje (University of California, San Diego), “The Da.rk Side of Diversity: Saul Fitelberg’s Failed Seduction.”
Marjorie Perloff (Stanford University), “The ‘Fascism’ of Twelve-Tone Music: Emigration, Exile and the Genesis of Dr. Faustus.”
Tobias Boes (University of Notre Dame), “Doctor Faustus and the Weight of the German Past.”
Simon Richter (University of Pennsylvania), “Fossil-Free Faust: Goethe and the Climate Emergency.”
Ruxandra Looft (Iowa State University), “Rosa Mayreder’s Anda Renata: Subverting Faust and the Cult of Male Genius.”
Wendy Nielsen (Montclaire State University), “Homunculus, Motherless Creation: The Irony of Professing Love and Science in Goethe’s Faust.”

Christopher Dea (independent director), On Directing Goethe’s Faust, October 2020.

Nadine M. Knight (College of the Holy Cross), “’The Chaos of the Needy Dead’: Beloved and the Struggle for Order,” November, 2019.

Ian Fleishman (University of Pennsylvania), “Camp/Abject: Queer Self-Erasure in Fassbinder’s Querelle,” (October 2019)

Tarek El-Ariss (Dartmouth College), “Monsters and Exiles: Queer Arab Trauma.” September 2019.

Jennifer Abod (independent filmmaker), “The Passionate Pursuits of Angela Bowen.” September 2019.

William Koelsch (Clark University), “The Revenant Returns,” Keynote Speaker at Opening of Exhibit on Clark LGBTQ History. April 2019.

Queer Writers of Worcester, April 2019.

Michael Snediker (University of Houston), “Elizabeth Bishop.”
Lisa Diedrich (Stony Brook University), “Paul Monette.”
Henry Abelove (Wesleyan University), “Frank O’Hara.”

Thomas Doughton (College of the Holy Cross), Gay Student Groups and Activism, March 2019.

Howard Chiang (University of California, Davis): “Queer Theory and Sinophone Studies.” September 2018.

Michael Lucey (University of California, Berkeley): “Translating the Disaffected / Translating Sexuality.” February 2018.

Rolf Goebels (University of Alabama in Huntsville): “Visualizing Music: Schubert, Beethoven, and the Cinematic Fantasy.” February 2018.

Jonathan Todres (Georgia State University): “Engaging Young People: Human Rights in Children’s Literature.” October 2017

Sarah Schulman (CUNY): “United in Anger: A History of ACT UP” and “Conflict Is Not Abuse.” September 2017.

Robert Sember (New School University): “Live to be Legend: Health, Art, and Kinship in the House and Ballroom Community.” April 2017

Ken Reeves (MIT): “Brother to Brother: Gay Black Men from the Age of Reagan to the Age of Trump.” April 2017.

Perspectives on Prostitution. March 2017

Nina Kushner (Clark University, History): “Camille and Her Troubles in Historical Context.” .
Ellen Foley (Clark University, IDCE): “Regulating Sex in Senegal.”
Marianne Sarkis (Clark University, IDCE): “From ‘ex-prostitute’ to ‘survivor of sexual exploitation’: Changing terms to change perceptions and policies around commercial sexual exploitation (CSE)/prostitution in Worcester.”

KJ Rawson (College of the Holy Cross): “Introducing the Digital Trans Archive.” March 2017.

Helga Druxes (Williams College): “‘Montag ist wieder PEGIDA-Tag’: Pegida’s Community Building and Discursive Strategies.” March 2017.

LGBT Asylum Taskforce. February 2017.

Lisa Silverman (University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee): “The Art of Loss: Madame D’Ora, Photography, and the Restitution of Jewish Property after the Holocaust.” February 2016.

Titler! Cabaret performance with Niki Luparelli. December 2015.

Elizabeth S. Anker (Cornell University): “For Love of Paradox: Human Rights and the Ends of Critical Theory.” November 2015.

Samuel Moyn (Harvard University): “Human Rights and the Holocaust, A Belated Entanglement.” October 2015.

Andrew Wackerfuss (United States Airforce): “Stormtrooper Families: Homosexuality and Community in the Nazi Party.” October 2015.

George Haggerty (University of California – Riverside): “What’s Queer about Frankenstein?” September 2015.

The German Discovery of Sex: Prostitution, Patriarchy, Pornography. April 2015

Jill Suzanne Smith (Bowdoin College): “Beyond the Femme Fatale: New Types of Prostitutes in Turn-of-the-Century and Weimar Berlin.”
Shaun Jacob Halper (Yale University): “Is Homosexuality a form of Genius? Reconsidering the Masculinist Wing of the First Homosexual Rights Movement in Central Europe.”
Peter Rehberg (University of Texas): “‘The Revolution Is Your Boyfriend’: Sexual Utopias after Reich and Marcuse.”

Kevin Kopelson (University of Iowa), “Has-Beens of the Cinema Firmament.” October 2014.

Alex Dimitrov, “The Poetics of Desire: Alex Dimitrov Reads from Begging for It.” October 2014.

Richard Blanco, inaugural poet of the United States, 2013, “The Journey to the Podium.” January 2014.

Paul Julian Smith (CUNY Graduate School), “After Volver: Almodovar in/and Latin America.” October 2013

Michael S. Roth (Wesleyan University), “The Freudian and the Liberal Arts.” September 2013.

Stanley Corngold (Princeton University), “Franz Kafka and the Poetry of Risk Insurance.” April 2012.

German Film and the Frankfurt School. Spring 2012.

Gerhard Richter (Brown University), “Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.’” March 2012.
Noah Isenberg (Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts), “Revisiting ‘The Decent German’: Siegfried Kracauer’s Critique of Postwar German Film.” March 2012.
Michael Jennings (Princeton University), “Benjamin, Kracauer, and the Invention of the Criticism of Popular Culture.” February 2012.

Queer Theory and the Roundabout. Fall 2011.

Brad Epps (Harvard University), “The (Queer) Space of the Vampire: Materiality and Disappearance in the Films of Iván Zulueta.” December 2011.
Worcester LGBT Asylum Taskforce. December 2011.
Thibaut Schilt (College of the Holy Cross), “François Ozon and Queerness à la française.” November 2011.
Andrew Parker (Amherst College), “Male Maternity in Nietzsche: Queering the Mother’s Gender.” October 2011.

Susan Bernofsky, “Translating Transnationalism: Yoko Tawada’s ‘Naked Eye.’” April 2011.

“A Mirror on Which to Dwell,” Elliott Carter’s Settings of Elisabeth Bishop’s poems, in honor of the 100^th anniversary of Bishop’s birth in Worcester, MA. April 2011.

Readings and opening lecture by Lloyd Schwartz (University of Massachusetts Boston)
Performance by the East Coast Contemporary Ensemble.

“The German Discovery of Sex: Activism, Medicine and Literature.” April 2011.

James Steakley (University of Wisconsin), “Hirschfeld’s Role Models”
Scott Spector (University of Michigan), “The Bite of Zastrow: Sexuality and the Subject of Violence”
Margaret Breen (University of Connecticut), “Queer Translations: Prime-Stevenson’s Imre (1906) and The Intersexes (1908) and the Emergence of Homosexual Identity”
Yvonne Ivory (University of North Carolina), “The Oscar Wilde Scandal in the German Press
Robert Beachey (Goucher College), “Gay Berlin.”
Conference Photos

Julia Ireland (Whitman College), “Natural Science and National Socialism: Sleuthing in the Heidegger Archives,” February 2011.

Joachim Pfeiffer (Pädagogische Hochschule Freiburg), “Jacob the Liar,” March 2010.

Rebecca Jordan-Young (Columbia University), “Hardwiring and Soft Science: Rethinking Sex in the Brain,” March 2010. (Facilitated and introduced.)

Peter Filkins, “Translating Ingebord Bachmann,” at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, January 2010. (Contributed.)

Nora Gomringer, slam poetry at Worcester Polytechnic University, December 2009)

“Global Freud.” November 2009.

Veronika Fuechtner (Dartmouth), “Berlin Psychoanalytic: Modernism, Race and Psychoanalysis in Weimar Republic Germany.”
Rubén Gallo (Princeton), “Freud and Stalin in Mexico.”
Nicole Simek (Whitman), “Postcolonial Freud.”
Wendy Larson (University of Oregon), “Freud and the Revolutionary Mind in China.”
Keith Vincent (Boston University), “Freud’s Disciples in Japan.”
Sander Gilman (Emory), “Electrotherapy Then and Now: Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Treatments in Psychiatry.”

“Music and Psychoanalysis.” QX performs “Lacan,” by Matt Malsky (Clark University). November 2009.

Zoe Beloff, “The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society and its Circle.” October 2009.

Sophie Freud, “Living in the Shadow of the Freud Family.” October 2009. (Facilitated and introduced.)

Gerard Camoin, “Using Poetry to Speak French.” Fall 2009. (Contributed.)

The Yes Men, film directors and provocateurs, screen early draft of film. April 2009.

Zafer Senocak and Elizabeth O. Wright, “Poetry and Politics.” March 2009.

“Film and Music: International Perspectives and Histories.” February 2009.

Julie Hubbert (University of South Carolina), “Music and German Invasion Films: Caligari in America.”
Matt Malsky (Clark University), “Scoring Ruttman’s Berlin Film: Considering Musical Meanings in Historical and Modern Contexts.”
Ivan Raykoff (Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts), “Oskar Fischinger’s Visual Music.”
Marvin D’Lugo (Clark University), “Cinematic Tangos: The Sound of the Culture Industry.”
Karl Nussbaum (Montclair State University) and John Aylward (Clark University), “My Voice Will Go With You.”

Lawrence Schehr (University of Illinois), “Beautiful Boys: Representing Gay Identity in Contemporary French Film.” October 2008.