Welcome Reception for Mel Y. Chen, 2020 F.O. Matthiessen Visiting Professor of Gender and Sexuality

We invite you to join us for a reception to welcome Mel Y. Chen, 2020 F.O. Matthiessen Visiting Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies. Chen joins us from the University of California, Berkeley where they are Associate Professor of Gender & Women's Studies and Director of the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture. 

While at Harvard, Professor Chen will teach two courses: Women, Men, and Other Animals, an undergraduate seminar, and In These Times: Queer, Feminist, Experimental Methods, a graduate seminar.

Please drop by the WGS lounge (Boylston Hall, ground floor) between 5:00-6:00pm on Tuesday, January 28^th to welcome Professor Chen to campus. Refreshments will be served. 

Mel Y. Chen is Associate Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at U.C. Berkeley. Their research and teaching interests include queer and gender theory, animal studies, critical race theory and Asian American studies, disability studies, science studies, and critical linguistics. Chen has published the book Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Duke University Press, 2012) and numerous writings in journals such as South Atlantic Quarterly, Women’s Studies Quarterly, GLQ, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, October, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Discourse, Women & Performance, Australian Feminist Studies, Amerasia, Worldviews, and Medical Humanities. Chen’s second book project concerns the relationships among the conceptual territories of “toxicity” and “intoxication,” questions of speed and temporality, and their involvement in histories of the shared interanimation of race and disability, thinking with state archives as well as with contemporary artists. 

The F.O. Matthiessen Visiting Professorship of Gender and Sexuality was created thanks to a generous gift from members and supporters of Harvard’s LGBTQ alumni group, the Harvard Gay & Lesbian Caucus (now the Harvard Gender & Sexuality Caucus). The resulting endowment enables Harvard to invite eminent scholars studying issues related to sexual minorities -- that is, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people -- or to sexuality, to teach in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. 

The Matthiessen Professorship is named after F. O. Matthiessen (1902–1950), founder of the field of American Studies and a distinguished gay Harvard professor. Matthiessen chaired the undergraduate program in history and literature at Harvard and was the first senior tutor of Eliot House.