2022 Distinguished Annual Lecture by Regina Kunzel
In Treatment: Psychiatry and the Archives of Modern Sexuality
This talk explores the encounter of sexual- and gender-variant people with psychiatry and psychoanalysis in the mid-20th-century U.S. and examines the role of psychiatric scrutiny and stigma in the making of modern sexuality. Focusing on the archive of St. Elizabeths Hospital, the federal hospital for the mentally ill in Washington, DC, Kunzel reflects on its meaning and challenges to queer history.
Flavin Family Auditorium | April 21, 2022 | 6-7:30pm | Free and Open to All | Free Parking Available
Regina Kunzel
Regina Kunzel is the Larned Professor of History and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Kunzel’s research focuses on histories of gender and sexuality, carcerality, and on the twined histories of sexual deviance and normalcy. Kunzel’s publications include Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality (University of Chicago Press, 2008), Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890 to 1945 (Yale University Press, 1993), and articles on queer history, transgender studies, disability studies, the history of prison sexual culture, single pregnancy, and gender and professionalization. Kunzel’s current project explores the encounter of LGBT/queer people with psychiatry in the twentieth-century United States.
Location and Access Information
Flavin Auditorium is located in Room 137 of the Isenberg School of Management on the campus of the University of Massachusetts Amherst (121 Presidents Drive, Amherst). Isenberg is located on Haigis Mall and is a short distance from the Robsham Visitors Center (300 Massachusetts Ave, $1.50/hour) and lot 34 (located on Massachusetts Ave directly west of the Visitors Center) which is free and open to the public after 5pm.
There are several bus stops nearby. More information: bus schedule, campus map with Flavin and nearby parking indicated.
Flavin Auditorium is wheelchair accessible. To request additional accommodations, email communications@history.umass.edu. More information: accessible parking, campus accessibility map.
The Distinguished Annual Lecture
The Department of History’s Distinguished Annual Lecture celebrates the 1996 establishment of the UMass/Five College Graduate Program in History. Combining the faculty and resources of the University of Massachusetts Amherst with those of four of the nation’s leading liberal arts colleges -- Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke and Smith Colleges -- this collaboration provides graduate students with an extraordinary depth of intellectual resources. Offered every academic year for more than 20 years, the program’s signature annual lecture has been delivered by some of the nation’s foremost historians.
Recent Distinguished Annual Lectures
2020-2021 | Mike Davis, California Burning: The Apocalyptic Trinity of Climate Change, Alien Plant Invasion and Exurbanization
2019-2020 | Erika Lee, Xenophobia in America: How We Got Here and What's At Stake
2018-2019 | Martha Newman, Assigned Female at Death: Joseph of Schönau's Disruption of Medieval Gender Binaries
2017-2018 | Scott Bruce, The Dark Age of Herodotus: Shards of a Fugitive History in Medieval Europe
2016-2017 | Talitha LeFlouria, Chained in Silence: A History of Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South
2015-2016 | Antoinette Burton, The Trouble with Empire: Challenges to Modern British Imperialism
2014-2015 | Tom Foster, Sex and the Founding Fathers: The American Quest for a Relatable Past
2013 | Ned Blackhawk, Indigenous Reckonings: American Indians and the Remaking of U.S. History
2012 | Thavolia Glymph, “Slavery is Not Dead: Black Women and Children on the Civil War’s Battlefield”
Book signing with Talitha LeFlouria following her 2016 lecture