Masterclass - Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns

Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns

Tuesday 29 November 2016
10:30am-12:30pm, with lunch to follow.
Boardroom, University of Queensland Art Museum, UQ St Lucia
All welcome. RSVP to uqche@uq.edu.au by 24 November 2016.

This two-hour masterclass with Professor Valerie Traub will focus on her latest book, Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns. It will provide an opportunity for honours students, postgraduates and staff to meet with Professor Traub and discuss the main themes of her book, including the ways in which historians can think about sex in pre-modern societies, the challenges involved in this endeavour, and the role of historiography and interdisciplinarity in the humanities.

More than just exploring the role of sex in early modern society, Professor Traub uses sex as a conceptual category that can allow us to better understand how early modern men and women thought. Participants will be able to explore this radical new approach to histories of sexuality with a leading expert in the field. As well as being of interest to historians of sexuality, this masterclass will be relevant to anyone interested in the fundamental question of how we ‘do’ history.

Valerie Traub is Adrienne Rich Distinguished University Professor and Frederick G. L. Huetwell Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, where she served as Chair of the Women’s Studies Department from 2003 to 2009 and from 2014 to 2015. Working across the disciplines of literature and history, she is a specialist in the study of gender and sexuality in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. She is the author of three monographs: Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (University of Cambridge Press, 2002), and Desire & Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (Routledge, 1992).

Readings (to be provided ahead of time):
Chapters 1 and 6 of Valerie Traub’s Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).

Presented by the UQ Node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Europe 1100-1800) and the UQ Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities.

Image: Courtesy of University of Pennsylvania Press.