CAMP LECTURE | “Against the North as well as the South, Abraham Lincoln as well as Jefferson Davis”: The Civil Wars of Lucy Broaddus, Frederick Douglass, and Franz Sigel | Angela Zimmerman, George Washington University
“If we fight, we must fight against the North as well as the South, Abraham Lincoln as well as Jefferson Davis,” Frederick Douglass declared in May 1861, just a few weeks after the Civil War began. His statement suggests a very different Civil War than the we usually hear about, centered on Abraham Lincoln: a war for the Union giving way to a tentative emancipation within the bounds of the law, the constitution, and private property. Occluded in such conventional narratives are struggles over white supremacy, the extent of Black freedom, capitalism, and patriotic nationalism. We get an entirely different war – not just a different interpretation of that war -- if we center radical perspectives that aimed for freedoms anathema to Union and Confederacy alike. In this talk I will look at the Civil War as it was understood by Lucy Broaddus, a woman born into slavery in Missouri in 1862, Frederick Douglass, and Franz Sigel, a communist German refugee who served as a general in the Union Army. Each presents a…
Event interval: Single day event. Accessibility Contact: histmain@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Wednesday, May 6, 2026, 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM.
K-Drama Made Them Tom-Gay: Thai Hallyu Imaginaries and Lesbian Possibilities
Please join the Center for Korea Studies for a special colloquium with Dredge Byung’chu Kang, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California San Diego.
The aesthetics of K-Pop flower boy masculinity, the narratives of K-Drama cross-gender characters, and imagined Korean lesbianism have refashioned contemporary tom (Thai butch lesbian) gender presentation, partnership patterns, and sexual roles. Many Thai youth are “ba kaoli” (crazed for all things Korean), including young lesbians. In this talk, I examine how Korean media, consumer goods, and cultural assets are mobilized to imagine, enact, and embody Asian cosmopolitan identities. I describe a case in which Thai tom become “tom-gay,” by coupling with another tom. This masculine homogender pairing was previously considered inconceivable when tom-dee relationships between a lesbian and a “normal” woman were the heterogender norm. I argue that tom participation in K-pop fandoms, adoption of soft masculine style, and identification with…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Thomson Hall (THO). Campus room: THO 317. Accessibility Contact: To request disability accommodation, contact the Disability Services Office at 206-543-6450 (voice), 206-543-6452 (TTY) or email at dso@u.washington.edu. The University of Washington makes every effort to honor disability accommodation requests. Requests can be responded to most effectively if received as far in advance of the event as possible. Event Types: Academics. Lectures/Seminars. Special Events.
Thursday, May 7, 2026, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM.
Double Crossover: Gender, Media, and Politics in Global Basketball with Courtney M. Cox
Move beyond the headlines and hot takes for a deeper conversation on labor and identity within women’s hoops with Courtney M. Cox, author of Double Crossover: Gender, Media, and Politics in Global Basketball (University of Illinois Press, 2025). Drawing on her book, she considers how athletes maneuver their lives and labor across leagues and borders, whether in the NCAA, WNBA, Athletes Unlimited, or overseas leagues.
Courtney M. Cox is Associate Professor in the Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies (IRES) at the University of Oregon. She previously worked for ESPN, Longhorn Network, NPR-affiliate KPCC, and the WNBA’s Los Angeles Sparks.
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Communications Building (CMU). Campus room: CMU 120. Accessibility Contact: dso@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars. Target Audience: This event is free and open to the public.
Thursday, May 7, 2026, 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM.
Graduate Workshop on Digital Accessibility
Geography has organized a Spring Quarter workshop with UW-IT's digital accessibility specialist, Mary-Colleen Jenkins, and GWSS graduate students are invited to attend.
The workshop will offer some concrete tips, first steps and best practices for making your digital course materials fully accessible. For those who are teaching their own class in the near future, this workshop could be a helpful resource.
, Attend via Zoom.
Event interval: Single day event. Accessibility Contact: dso@uw.edu. Event Types: Workshops. Target Audience: Graduate Students.
Tuesday, May 12, 2026, 10:00 AM – 11:30 AM.
Zoom.
The Future that Was: A History of Third World Feminism Against Authoritarianism, Featuring Durba Mitra
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Bagley Hall (BAG). Campus room: BAG 260. Accessibility Contact: GWSS. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Tuesday, May 12, 2026, 3:30 PM – 5:30 PM.
The Future that Was: A History of Third World Feminism Against Authoritarianism, Featuring Durba Mitra
Feminist historian Durba Mitra (Harvard University) offers in The Future That Was A History of Third World Feminism Against Authoritarianism (Princeton, 2026) a pathbreaking account of how women in the 1970s, from former colonies in South Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and beyond, wrote Third World feminism into being, catalyzing a momentous expansion of knowledge about women, gender, and sexuality that transformed emancipatory politics across the globe. Women gathered at international conferences, wrote reports on the dangers facing women, and took to the streets in protest, building a world of knowledge that contested the devastating effects of patriarchy and colonialism. Yet, despite hundreds of laws, institutions, and publications created through the efforts of these women, the future they imagined was never fully realized. The Future That Was transforms the story of decolonization and its aftermath through the history and ideas of women. By excavating these vital pasts, Mitra shows how we might envision a…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Bagley Hall (BAG). Campus room: BAG 260. Accessibility Contact: gwss@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Tuesday, May 12, 2026, 3:30 PM – 5:30 PM.
Public Lecture | Have “Men” and “Women” Always Existed? What the Talmud Can Tell Us, presented by by Dr. Rafael Neis (University of Michigan)
We often assume that the categories “man” and “woman” are stable and self-evident. Indeed, ideas about the timelessness of gender may also underpin the refrain that “trans and nonbinary people have always existed.” This framing asks us to support the right of contemporary gender-diverse people to exist and flourish, in part, by recognizing that they, too, have an ancient lineage. In this talk, Professor Rafael Neis presents an altogether different approach to gender. Through a journey into Talmudic texts composed in late ancient Iraq, they invite us to set aside what we think we already know about gender categories. Doing so, Professor Neis argues, will illuminate how the ancient rabbis sought to invent, classify, and make meaning of the diverse plurality of human and other beings.
Registration Required.
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Kane Hall (KNE). Campus room: KNE 225. Accessibility Contact: dso@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Tuesday, May 12, 2026, 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM.
For more info visit events.uw.edu. Black Digital Studies in the Age of Techno-Fascism Lightning Talks
The racialized perils of digital technologies bear heavily on the present. These range from AI’s impact on ecosystems and scarce water resources to surveillance technologies which suppress dissent and social protest movements. Historically, Black populations in the US and abroad have been a testing ground for the use of digital technologies to curtail freedom and create unequal material impacts on everyday life and resources. This is something we are currently witnessing at rapid and far-reaching pace.
Join the UW’s Black Digital Humanities in the Age of Technofascism research cluster for drop-in talks by scholars in the field, along with the community-led organisation Wa Na Wari. Presenters will briefly introduce their work using an object that they have chosen to represent their academic research.
Speakers:
Rebecca Bayeck, Utah State University
Simone Durham, Morgan State University
Christopher Paul Harris, University of California Irvine
Jelani Ince, University of Washington
Brandy Monk-Payton, Fordham…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Henry Art Gallery (HAG). Accessibility Contact: Simpson Center for the Humanities, 206.543.3920, humanities@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Thursday, May 14, 2026, 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM.
Public Lecture | Monsters, Hybrids, and Holy Images – Rethinking Bodies in Ancient Jewish Art, presented by Dr. Rafael Neis (University of Michigan)
Walk through the ancient Mediterranean and Middle East, and you would have been surrounded by images of all kinds—human figures, animals, hybrids, and creatures that blur the line between the familiar and the fantastic. These images appeared everywhere: in streets and homes, bathhouses and synagogues, public buildings and sacred spaces. Art historians have traditionally taken upon themselves the role of assigning gender or species designations to such images in ways that replicate modern gender and sexuality concepts (especially of “male” and “female” or “masculine” and “feminine”). In this talk, Professor Rafael Neis explores a handful of examples from late ancient Jewish art in the Roman Galilee and Sasanian Iraq. Instead of sorting these images into boxes like “human,” “animal,” or “hybrid,” or even “male,” “female,” and “queer,” they invite us to see the complex ways in which ancient artists and communities imagined species, divinity, and gender. The result is an account of ancient Jewish visual culture…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Student Union Building (HUB). Campus room: HUB 214. Accessibility Contact: dso@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Thursday, May 14, 2026, 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM.
For more info visit events.uw.edu. GWSS RSO | Quarterly Movie Night
Details TBA.
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Savery Hall (SAV). Campus room: SAV 162. Accessibility Contact: gwss@uw.edu. Event Types: Screenings. Student Activities.
Thursday, May 14, 2026, 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM.
29th Annual Undergraduate Research Symposium
More than 1,700 students from all three UW campuses and other local institutions will present their research in a wide range of disciplines, including oceanography, performing arts, physics, education, archeology, molecular biology and just about everything in between.
The Symposium takes place on the UW campus in Seattle, with opening remarks from UW President Robert J. Jones and Vice Provost and Dean of Undergraduate Academic Affairs Ed Taylor.
Summary schedule of events Registration recommended
11:00–11:15 a.m. // Event Welcome, Join us in the MGH Commons to hear from President Robert J. Jones and Vice Provost and Dean of Undergraduate Academic Affairs Ed Taylor, 11:00 a.m.–4:50 p.m. // Poster Presentations, Visit research posters and engage students in thoughtful discussions about their projects. 11:30 a.m.–5:15 p.m. // Oral Presentations, Attend a series of focused, 10‑minute research presentations organized around a specific theme. 12:30–2:30 p.m. // Performing Arts Session, Experience…
Event interval: Single day event. Accessibility Contact: UndergradResearch@uw.edu. Event Types: Conferences. Target Audience: Free and open to the public.
Friday, May 15, 2026, 11:00 AM – 5:15 PM.
Multiple locations: Mary Gates Hall (MGH), Allen Library (ALB) Research Commons, Meany Hall (MNY) Studio Theatre, Nanoengineering & Sciences Building (NAN), Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering (CSE).
Persistence Projects: with Dr Jennifer Lisa Vest
Dr. Jennifer Lisa Vest is an Afro-Indigenous two spirit physicist, philosopher, medical intuitive, Akashic records reader, mystic, ceremonialist, certified Quantum Healing Hypnosis Technique practitioner, a Master Reiki practitioner, and trained in the traditions of African American Hoodoo, Native American Sweat Lodge, Jamaican Revivalism, Trinidadian Shango, and Spiritualism from community elders. She is a teacher of medical intuition, mysticism, mediumship, psychic development, and spiritual healing — and the author of The Ethical Psychic and Sovereign Wisdom: Generating Native American Philosophy from Indigenous Cultures. She holds a PhD in Indigenous Philosophy from UC Berkeley, an MA in history from Howard University, and a BA in physics from Howard University. Her first career was as a philosophy professor at Seattle University and the University of Central Florida.
Dr. Vest is a former philosophy professor with extensive teaching experience in higher education in the Northwest and the West Coast.…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Parrington Hall (PAR). Campus room: PAR 320. Accessibility Contact: dso@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Friday, May 15, 2026, 11:30 AM – 1:00 PM.
Cookies & Conversation | AI & Pedagogy with GWSS Assistant Professor Kavita Dattani
Join us for Cookies & Conversation with Kavita Dattani.
What are the pedagogical stakes of using AI in teaching and learning? In this session, we will think through the impacts of AI in the classroom and consider how to respond in ways that center critical thinking and GWSS’s broader curricular learning goals.
Faculty and graduate students are invited to reflect on current challenges, share approaches, and map out strategies for engaging AI in their teaching.
Come for the conversation, stay for the milk & cookies.
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Padelford Hall (PDL). Campus room: PDL B110-G. Accessibility Contact: gwss@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars. Target Audience: GWSS Faculty & Graduate Students.
Friday, May 15, 2026, 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM.
Sexuality & Queer Studies Capstone: "Creating an Asexual Gender: Hermaphroditus in Ovid's Metamorphoses," presented by Laura Harris
This talk explores how asexuality can produce a unique asexual gender formation through a process of ungendering.
Not only does this appear in modern sociology, but also in ancient Roman literature where the Roman sex/gender system in which one’s role in sex could be determinative of gender heightens this effect.
This talk argues that Hermaphroditus in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a long poem from the first century CE telling of transformations, can be read as asexual and that in his story asexuality can be understood as producing and literalizing a unique gender formation created through a process of ungendering.
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Padelford Hall (PDL). Campus room: PDL B110 G. Accessibility Contact: gwss@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Wednesday, May 20, 2026, 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM.
Activism, Music, and Zapatista Philosophy with Martha and Quetzal, moderated by Haley Chavez, Yasmine Gomez, Markus Teuton
Description to come.
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Architecture Hall (ARC). Campus room: ARC 160. Accessibility Contact: dso@uw.edu. Event Types: Screenings. Target Audience: Free and open to the public.
Thursday, May 21, 2026, 3:30 PM – 5:20 PM.
The Office of Public Lectures presents: What Does Law Mean in Crisis? How Crip Feminist Technoscience Will Save Us with Ly Xīnzhèn M. Zhǎngsūn Brown
In the shadow of an empire, in a world on fire, what if we could imagine — and build — otherwise? Crip feminist technoscience teaches us how to wield disabled, mad, neuroexpansive, crip, sick people’s wisdom as a vital tool for surviving now and thriving then. Disabled people know intimately how to strategically leverage legal and policy tools and know precisely the limitations of these tools and frameworks.
In a polycrisis of pandemic, late-stage capitalism, genocide, climate catastrophe, human rights atrocity, and failure of democratic institutions, we find ourselves confronted with headlines about declining productivity, increased rates of depression, AI plagiarism, and the cost of eggs. We debate about the meaning of international norms and rule of law while the settler empire is crumbling and fascism and white supremacy are growing in fertile ground. Universities are adjunctifying the professoriate, union busting grad students and dining hall workers, repressing student activism, and refusing to addres…
Event interval: Single day event. Accessibility Contact: dso@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Thursday, May 21, 2026, 6:30 PM – 8:00 PM.
Town Hall Seattle.
For more info visit www.washington.edu. Dissertation Defense: "'Errybody Gotta Eat': Black Queer Food Geographies and the Politics of Refusal," featuring Keila D. Taylor
This dissertation introduces Black Queer Food Geographies as a framework for understanding how Black queer people create spaces of nourishment, care, and belonging in everyday life. Drawing on interviews, ethnographic fieldwork, and digital analysis, the project examines how food practices like cooking, gathering, hosting, and sharing function as forms of resistance to racial, gendered, and spatial exclusion.
Across sites including farms, communal living spaces, retreats, and social media platforms like Instagram, I argue that Black queer food practices operate through what I call quare food refusals: quiet, embodied strategies that reject dominant expectations around visibility, consumption, and inclusion. These refusals are generative practices that produce alternative ways of living and sustaining community. By moving beyond conventional understandings of food equity as nutrition or access, this project highlights how nourishment is also affective, relational, and deeply tied to questions of space, identi…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Padelford Hall (PDL). Campus room: PDL B110 G. Accessibility Contact: gwss@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Friday, May 22, 2026, 11:00 AM – 11:30 AM.
The Berlin Stories: One City, One Summer, Five Takes
Join us for a student-centered roundtable talk and hear five former members of the Summer in Berlin program reflect in a candid and engaging way on their experiences while living abroad. Each student interacted with the city in different ways and will explore the diversity of Berlin through a unique lens. Rafael Andaya is a senior attending the Bothell campus of the University of Washington, majoring in Media and Communications. He will highlight how the music and club scene in Berlin is more sacred in the way that it creates safe spaces for queer and alternative identities to be free, allows for creative freedom, and juxtaposes the performative glamorization and fetishization of the club scene in the West. Mary Louisa Donoghue is a third year student from Austin, TX studying Cinema & Media Studies and International Studies. She will discuss Berlin’s film scene and how it works in tandem with the city’s open, creative, and expressive cultural environment. She will also explore how this study abroad program…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Denny Hall (DEN). Campus room: 359. Accessibility Contact: Department of German Studies, uwgerman@uw.edu. Event Types: Special Events. Diversity Equity Inclusion.
Friday, May 22, 2026, 1:30 PM – 3:00 PM.
Memorial Day
Holidays
No classes. Most University offices and buildings are closed. Check with specific offices to confirm.
Event interval: Single day event. Year: 2026. Quarter: Spring. Event Types: Academics.
Monday, May 25, 2026.
For more info visit www.washington.edu. GWSS RSO | Year in Review: Constitution review and archival project with UW Special Collections
Details TBA.
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Savery Hall (SAV). Campus room: SAV 162. Accessibility Contact: gwss@uw.edu. Event Types: Meetings. Student Activities.
Thursday, May 28, 2026, 6:00 PM – 7:30 PM.
The Prosecution of Transgender as Heterodoxy in Qing Dynasty China | Prof. Matthew Sommer, Stanford
Professor Matthew Sommer’s new book The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China (Columbia UP, 2024) considers a range of transgender practices and paradigms in Late Imperial China, illuminating how certain forms of gender transgression were sanctioned in particular contexts and penalized in others. This talk will focus on the crime of “a male masquerading in female attire” (男扮女裝), which was prosecuted by applying the statute against “using deviant ways and heterodox principles to incite and deceive the common people” (左道異端煽惑人民). Anatomical males who presented as women sometimes took a conventionally female occupations such as midwife, faith healer, or even medium to a fox spirit — yet, suspected of sexual predation, they risked death for the crime of “masquerading in women’s attire,” even when they had lived peacefully in their communities for years.
Matthew H. Sommer (BA Swarthmore, MA U. of Washington, PHD UCLA) is the Bowman Family Professor of History…
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Student Union Building (HUB). Campus room: 340. Accessibility Contact: histmain@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars.
Thursday, May 28, 2026, 7:00 PM – 8:30 PM.
Lavender Graduation
Lavender Graduation celebrates LGBTQ+ students at UW and honors their resilience, achievements, and community.
Registration Open April 10-May 22.
Event interval: Single day event. Accessibility Contact: qcenter@uw.edu. Event Types: Ceremonies.
Tuesday, June 9, 2026, 5:00 PM – 7:30 PM.
Location TBD.
GWSS Graduation Celebration
The University of Washington Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies invites you to join us to celebrate our graduates of the 2025-2026 school year! We will honor the accomplishments of our wonderful graduates with presentations by students and faculty.
The University of Washington is committed to providing access, equal opportunity and reasonable accommodation in its services, programs, activities, education and employment for individuals with disabilities. To request disability accommodation contact the Disability Services Office at least ten days in advance at: 206.543.6450/V, 206.543.6452/TTY, 206.685.7264 (FAX), or e-mail at dso@u.washington.edu.
Event interval: Single day event. Campus location: Student Union Building (HUB). Campus room: Lyceum. Accessibility Contact: gwss@uw.edu. Event Types: Ceremonies. Special Events. Student Activities.
Wednesday, June 10, 2026, 5:00 PM – 7:00 PM.
Juneteenth
Holidays
No classes. Most University offices and buildings are closed. Check with specific offices to confirm.
Event interval: Single day event. Year: 2026. Quarter: Summer. Event Types: Academics.
Friday, June 19, 2026.
For more info visit www.washington.edu. Independence Day (Observed)
Holidays
No classes. Most University offices and buildings are closed. Check with specific offices to confirm.
Event interval: Single day event. Year: 2026. Quarter: Summer. Event Types: Academics.
Friday, July 3, 2026.
For more info visit www.washington.edu.