Black Sexuality in the Archive: A Public Conversation

The historical record surrounding sexuality is often spotty, confusing, and, at times, offensive. Yet issues of gender and sexuality are increasingly important to the ways that Africans and people of African descent consider matters of politics, culture, family, religion, and identity.

WGS has invited three remarkable scholars to offer advice and encouragement to researchers at all levels on how to address these concerns. Historian Jennifer Morgan, who studies women and slavery; literary critic Julin Everett, who researches homoerotic desire in Francophone postcolonial literature; and archivist/activist Steven Fullwood will discuss both the challenges and the possibilities of using archival materials to explain the complex histories of gender and sexuality on the African continent and within the African Diaspora.

Jennifer Morgan is a distinguished historian of enslaved women’s history. She is Professor of History in the department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University where she also serves as Chair. She is the author of Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery and the co-editor of Connexions: Histories of Race and Sex in North America (University of Illinois Press, 2016).

Julin Everett is an Assistant Professor of French in the Department of Modern Languages at Ursinus College. She is an innovative scholar of queer sexualities in the African Diaspora, and the author of Le Queer Impérial: Male Homoerotic Desire in Francophone Colonial and Postcolonial Literature.

Steven Fullwood is a nationally prominent archivist, documentarian, and writer committed to collecting the materials of black LGBTQ communities. He is the former Assistant Curator of the Manuscripts, Archives & Rare Books Division at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, and the founder of the In the Life Archive. 

Co-sponsored by the Committee on Degrees in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, the Office of BGLTQ Student Life, the Department of African and African American Studies, and the Harvard Library system, with generous support from the Division of Social Sciences and the Regan Fund.