On Thursday, April 21, Regina Kunzel, Larned Professor of History and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University, will deliver the UMass Amherst Department of History’s 2022 Distinguished Annual Lecture.
This event is free and open to the public.
Titled “In Treatment: Psychiatry and the Archives of Modern Sexuality,” the lecture will explore the encounter of sexual- and gender-variant people with psychiatry and psychoanalysis in the mid-20th-century US and examine 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 will reflect on its meaning and challenges to queer history.
"Regina Kunzel has long been a leader not only in US women’s history, but also in LGBTQ+ studies," said Joel Wolfe, professor of history and graduate program director. "Her work is both innovative and centered on key issues in the historiography, and so it often upends a lot of that historiography.”
A nationally renowned historian of the modern US with a focus on histories of gender and sexuality, queer history, and the history of incarceration, Kunzel is currently writing a book on the encounters of LGBT/queer people with psychiatry in the twentieth-century United States. Kunzel’s previous 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.
The Department of History’s Distinguished Annual Lecture celebrates the 1996 establishment of the UMass/Five College Graduate Program in History. 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. Combining the faculty and resources of UMass 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.
The lecture is scheduled to take place on April 21 from 6pm–7:30pm in the Flavin Family Auditorium, Room 137, at the Isenberg School of Management. Due to the sensitive nature of the archival records, this lecture will not be recorded or publicly streamed online. Accommodations are available for those unable to attend in person. Email @email to receive a private streaming link.
For more information about location and access, including public transit and parking, visit the event page here.