Susan Stryker Featured as 2018 Ruth D. Ewing Lecturer
Susan Stryker, award-winning scholar and filmmaker whose historical research, theoretical writing, and creative works have helped shape the cultural conversation on transgender topics since the early 1990s, will be the 2018 Ruth D. Ewing Lecturer at Bennington College.
The lecture will take place at 8 PM Thursday, Ma
y 3, at Tishman Lecture Hall on Bennington’s campus. This event is free and open to the public.
“It is a great honor to have Susan Stryker close the Beyond the Binaries speaker series we hosted on campus throughout the Spring Term,” Social Psychology faculty member Ella Ben Hagai said. “Stryker’s research and her talk on Thursday are especially important because they help the community and transgender students better understand transgender history. Understanding transgender history is essential to making sense of the current day transgender revolution and its future.”
The Ruth D. Ewing Lecture Series serves to bring special guest lecturers in the social sciences to Bennington College today. The series was established in honor of alumna Ruth Ewing ’37 (1915-2014), who was a distinguished trustee from 1979 to 1982 and honored her Bennington education with unstinting generosity.
Dr. Susan Stryker earned her Ph.D. in United States History at the University of California-Berkeley in 1992, later held a Ford Foundation/Social Science Research Council post-doctoral fellowship in sexuality studies at Stanford University, and has been a distinguished visiting faculty member at Harvard University, Macquarie University in Sydney, Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, and the University of California-Santa Cruz. She is the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of numerous books and anthologies, including Gay by the Bay: A History of Queer Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area, Queer Pulp: Perverse Passions in the Golden Age of the Paperback, The Transgender Studies Reader, Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution, and The Transgender Studies Reader 2. Her academic articles have appeared in such publications as GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Radical History Review, South Atlantic Quarterly, Parallax, Australian Feminist Studies, Social Semiotics, and Journal of Women’s History, while her public scholarship has appeared in Aperture, Wired, The Utne Reader, and Slate.com.
She won an Emmy Award for her documentary film Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria (ITVS 2005), and is also the recipient of a Lambda Literary Award (2006), the Ruth Benedict Book Prize (2013), the Monette-Horowitz Prize for LGBTQ activism (2008), the Transgender Law Center’s Community Vanguard Award (2003), and two career achievement awards in LGBTQ Studies—the David Kessler Award in from the City University of New York’s Center for LGBT Studies in 2008, and the Yale University’s Brudner Memorial Prize in 2015.
Dr. Stryker served for several years as Executive Director of the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco (1999-2003), and for five years as Director of the Institute for LGBT Studies at the University of Arizona (2011-2016), where she is Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and coordinator of the university’s Transgender Studies Initiative. In addition to serving as founding co-editor of the academic journal TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, she is currently developing several media projects, and has a book under contract to Farrar Straus Giroux, What Transpires Now, about the uses of transgender history for the present.