Trans History Now!

Trans scholarship is profoundly expanding existing histories of gender and sexuality including in terms of the ways in which we approach the past and understand its relationship to the present. This session brings together PhD and Early Career Researchers working on a range of topics in trans history, showcasing their work to give a snapshot of current research in the field.

Speakers include:

• Brell Wilson-Morris on negotiating sexuality in the emergence of transgender 
• Jamey Jesperson on histories of colonial trans misogyny, sex work and trans feminine survivance
• Jo Brydon-Dickenson on trans experience and identity in literature and music
• Leila Sellers on trans identity, community and belonging in late-twentieth century Britain.
• Zavier Nunn on histories of trans modernity, trans subjectivity and selfhood, and medico-legal practice

is a CHASE funded doctoral student in the School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication at Birkbeck, University of London. His project focuses on recent (1980s – 2000s) trans history, primarily in the US. Drawing on archival material, his work explores how trans discourses in the 1980s-2000s negotiated questions of sexuality as a field of power.

Jamey Jesperson is a Vanier Scholar and PhD Candidate in History and Cultural, Social, and Political Thought at the University of Victoria. Focusing on the Pacific coast of Indigenous North America, she traces histories of trans femininity and trans misogyny under the Spanish and British empires. In 2021, Jamey’s MA Queer History thesis from Goldsmiths College was named “best dissertation in the UK” by the Royal Historical Society. Through ‘storywork’ collaboration with Two-Spirit Knowledge Keeper Saylesh Wesley, Jamey’s PhD dissertation endeavors to ‘re-story’ trans Indigenous lives and worlds in the Pacific Northwest at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Jo Brydon-Dickenson is a PhD Candidate in History at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her research uses the writings of Percy Grainger to explore how trans people in Edwardian London may have conceptualised identities outside of the gender binary in relation to race, nation, and sexuality. Borrowing techniques from musicology, she also shows how Grainger's expression of a trans identity was not just informed by the Victorian literature they read, but also shaped their creative output.
 
Leila Sellers is a Wellcome funded PhD candidate at Birkbeck exploring the lives and experiences of trans women through a history of the Beaumont Society – a UK trans support group. Through a combination of oral history interview and archival research her project examines trans belonging and selfhood, trans everyday experience, and the vicissitudes of language. Leila’s dissertation seeks to contribute to broader historical discussions on the uneven and often contradictory nature of social change in late-twentieth century Britain, told from the marginalised perspective of trans women.

Zavier Nunn is the Postdoctoral Associate of 'Histories of the Transgender Present' in the Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies Department at Duke University. His PhD, from the University of Oxford, provides an everyday history of trans feminine life in Weimar and Nazi Germany. His second project will historicise modern trans subjectivity, specifically the ontology of an internal gender identity and its epistemological counterpart, the 'wrong body narrative'. Across his research, he uses micro-historical methods to unpick how macro systems and institutions are stitched together, and how affects circulate on a personal and collective level. His work is published in Past & Present, Gender & History, and is forthcoming in German History.

- this seminar is free to attend, but advance registration is required.