APRIL 7, 2025
"Sarah Ensor presents, 'Queer Lasting: Ecologies of Care for a Dying World'" 
Co-sponsored by LGBTQ+ RC, CfAH, English Dept

• Ensor is an assistant professor of English at UW-Madison. Queer Lasting asks what contemporary environmentalism’s focus on the future has neglected and looks to literature from two eras of queer extinction — the 1890s and the 1980s — for alternate models of care and persistence. Participants enaged in a timely, necessary discussion of how to care for one another and our world. 

MARCH 20, 2025
"LGBTQ+ Research Community / Studies Discussion & Reflection" 
Hosted by LGBTQ+ RC

• Faculty and staff gathered to discuss the community in the current political climate.

OCTOBER 28, 2024
"LGBTQ+ Research Community Book Discussion"
Hosted by LGBTQ+ RC

• Members gathered to discuss Sarah Shulman's 2016 book "Conflict is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair" 

APRIL 25, 2024
"Travis Chi Wing Lau Presents, 'The Literary and Cultural History of Anti-Vaccination'"
Co-Sponsored by ADVANCE, INGS, English Dept, LGBTQ+ RC

• Dr. Travis Chi Wing Lau, assistant professor of English at Kenyon College, presented on his expertise of literary and cultural history of anti-vaccination. Anti-vaccination is often discussed as if it were a modern problem of the relatively recent or even immediate present — as anti-science/pseudoscience, as religious fundamentalism, as neoliberal choice, as the dangers of Big Pharma. But these claims often become explicitly ahistorical. Debates over the efficacy and legitimacy of vaccination, as well as its potential effects, date back to its inception as a medical practice popularized by Edward Jenner in the late 1790s. Turning to the late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century vaccination debates, this talk explores the role of literature and visual culture as they were mobilized by proponents both for and against vaccination. After the presentation, a Q&A session took place.

SEPTEMBER 20, 2023
"Experiences of LGBTQ+ Faculty in STEM Panel"
Co-sponsored by ADVANCE, INGS, LGBTQ+ Resource Center, LGBTQ+ Research Community

• Panelists included three STEM faculty members who identify as part of the LGBTQ+ community from Massachusetts (Dr. Andre Isaacs), Michigan (Dr. Itzel Marquez), and California (Dr. Nicholas Tatonetti). Chris Stockdale, associate professor and assistant chair of physics, was the MC. After the panel, a small reception took place to give time for students and faculty to learn even more about the panelists.