History of Sexuality at the 2016 American Historical Association Conference

The 130th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA) takes place January 7-10, 2016, in Atlanta, Georgia. The theme for this year’s conference, “Global Migrations: Empires, Nations, and Neighbors,” opens the meeting to a number of exciting panels and events devoted to exploring the history of sexuality across time and space, which we have listed for our readers below. Many of these offerings are part of a mini-conference embedded in the broader AHA program by the Committee on LBGT History – the AHA affiliate for queer historians and those who study LGBT History.

Thursday, January 7

1:00 pm – 3:00 pm

Intimate Relations: Reevaluating Transnational Relations of Gender, Sexuality, and Citizenship in the New Diplomatic History
Room A704 (Atlanta Marriott Marquis, Atrium Level)

• Chair: Petra Goedde, Temple University
• Anita Casavantes Bradford, University of California, Irvine
• Amanda Boczar, United States Military Academy, West Point
• Sarah C. Kovner, Columbia University
• Sabrina Thomas, Wabash College

The Origins of Women’s Prisons in the United States
Crystal Ballroom B (Hilton Atlanta, First Floor)

• Chair: Michelle Jones, Indiana Women’s Prison
• Sexual Conquest and 19th-Century Women’s Prisons, Anastazia Schmid, Indiana Women’s Prison
• The Social Death and Resurrection of Friendless Women in Postbellum Indiana, Kim Baldwin, Indiana Women’s Prison
• Religious Reformers and the Origins of Women’s Prisons, Leslie Hauk, Indiana Women’s Prison
• The Haunting of the Sexually Autonomous Prostitute, Michelle Jones, Indiana Women’s Prison

Queer Migrations, Part 1: Transperformance: Historicizing and Theorizing Performative Transgender Acts
Room 211 (Hilton Atlanta, Second Floor)

• Chair and commentator: Gabriela Cano, El Colegio de Mexico
• Castrati and the Foundations of Pejorative Transsexual Scripting, Katherine B. Crawford, Vanderbilt University
• Trans-seduction: Transgender Sexual Performance and the Transnational Cold War Cabaret Industry, Carson Morris, University of New Mexico
• Female Impersonation and the Queer Circulation of Female Visuality, Mara Dauphin, George Washington University
• Performing the Deconstruction of Gender and Ethnicity through the Art of Punk Drag, Frankc Berlanga-Medina, University of Arkansas

The Migrating Black Female Body in 1920s Central and Eastern Europe: Josephine Baker’s Reception in Vienna, Zagreb, Belgrade, and Istanbul
Room 201 (Hilton Atlanta, Second Floor)

• Chair: Tiffany N. Florvil, University of New Mexico
• Commentator: Nancy Nenno, College of Charleston
  
• Dancing in a Banana Skirt in the City of Music: Josephine Baker in 1920s Vienna, Kira Thurman, University of Akron
•  Josephine Baker in Belgrade and Zagreb: Opposing Receptions to European Entertainment in Interwar Yugoslavia, Jovana Babovic, Louisiana Tech University
• “Jozefin Beyker”: The Black Body, Femininity, and Jazz Culture in the Early Turkish Republic, Carole Woodall, University of Colorado Colorado Springs

3:30 pm – 5:30 pm

Research Roundtable: Transgression, Gender, and Community in Eurasia, 1600-1800
Room M101 (Atlanta Marriott Marquis, Marquis Level)

• Chair: Susan D. Amussen, University of California, Merced
  
• Jeannette Kamp, Leiden University
  
• Jacob Melish, University of Northern Colorado
  
• Jungwon Kim, Columbia University
• Susan D. Amussen, University of California, Merced

Roundtable: Writing Catholic History after the Sex Abuse Crisis
Spring Room (Hyatt Regency Atlanta, Atlanta Conference Center Level)

• Chair and commentator: Catherine Osborne, University of Notre Dame
• Evidence and Historical Confidence, Leslie W. Tentler, Catholic University of America
• Catholic Emotional Communities, John C. Seitz, Fordham University
• Reading Archives with Survivors: The Critical Space between Historicism and the Phenomenology of Suffering, Brian Clites, Northwestern University
• Behind the Wall: The Archivist and the Researcher, Emilie Gagnet Leumas, Archdiocese of New Orleans
• What Did I Know and When Did I Know It?, James O’Toole, Boston College

The LGBTQ Historians Task Force Survey and Report: Where Do We Go from Here?
Crystal Ballroom B (Hilton Atlanta, First Floor)

• Chair: Mary Louise Roberts, University of Wisconsin-Madison
• Leisa D. Meyer, College of William and Mary
• La Shonda Mims, Towson University
• Mary Louise Roberts, University of Wisconsin-Madison
• Nicholas L. Syrett, University of Northern Colorado

Dirty Magazines, Female Pills, and the Price of Bread: Gender and Sexuality in Local Responses to Transnational Processes
Salon B (Hilton Atlanta, Second Floor)

• Chair and commentator: Donna Patterson, Delaware State University
• The Personal Cost of Empire: An Exploration of Naval Families’ Economic Survival, Sofia Zepeda, University of Arizona
• Abortion and the Rise of Transatlantic Pharmaceutical Manufacturing in the Early 20th Century, Kyle Fernandez, Indiana University Bloomington
• Transnational Pornography Networks and Local Subculture in Britain, 1900–39, Jamie Stoops, Pima Community College

Why Caribbean Women’s History Matters
Room A601 (Atlanta Marriott Marquis, Atrium Level)

• Chair: Eileen J. Findlay, American University
  
• Commentator: Michele Johnson, York University
  
• Michelle Chi Chase, Bloomfield College
  
• Joan Victoria Flores-Villalobos, New York University
  
• Anne Macpherson, College at Brockport (State University of New York)
  
• Tyesha Maddox, New York University

Friday, January 8

8:30 am – 10:00 am

Reproducing Gossip: Gender, Rumor, and Fertility Control
Room M101 (Atlanta Marriott Marquis, Marquis Level)

• Chair and commentator: Rachel Fuchs, Arizona State University
• From “That Wicked House”: Reputation and Infanticide in 17th-Century Massachusetts, Emily Romeo, University of Chicago
• Ouvi Dizer [Heard Said]: Abortion Rumors and Male Power in Turn-of-the-Century Rio de Janeiro, Cassia Roth, University of California, Los Angeles
• Telling Tales: Hidden Knowledge and Denunciation in French Abortion and Infanticide Cases, 1900–40, Karen E. Huber, Wesleyan College

Before/Outside/Beyond Gay Marriage: New Directions in the History of Marriage in the United States
Room 211 (Hilton Atlanta, Second Floor)

• Chair: Rebecca L. Davis, University of Delaware
• Alison L. Lefkovitz, New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University-Newark
• William Kuby, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
• Christina Simmons, University of Windsor
• Nicholas L. Syrett, University of Northern Colorado
• Kristin M Celello, Queens College, City University of New York

Disorderly City: Race, Gender, and Social Transformation in Civil War-Era New Orleans
Room A704 (Atlanta Marriott Marquis, Atrium Level

• Chair: Leslie M. Harris, Emory University
• Commentator: Nik Ribianszky, Georgia Gwinnett College
• The Cook and the General: Black Women, the Union Army, and the End of Slavery in New Orleans, James Illingworth, University of California, Santa Cruz
• “Pugnacious Females”: Women’s Public Violence and the Police in Reconstruction-Era New Orleans, Elizabeth P. Smith, University of Arkansas

10:30 am – 12:00 pm

Publishing in Queer History: A Roundtable with Editors
Room 211 (Hilton Atlanta, Second Floor)

• Chair: Amanda H. Littauer, Northern Illinois University
• Douglas Mitchell, University of Chicago Press
• Clara Platter, New York University Press
• Annette Timm, University of Calgary and Journal of the History of Sexuality
• Leigh Ann Wheeler, Binghamton University (State University of New York) and Journal of Women’s History

12:30 pm – 1:30 pm

Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History Business Meeting
Room 205 (Hilton Atlanta, Second Floor)

• Presiding: Amanda H. Littauer, Northern Illinois University
• Nicholas L. Syrett, University of Northern Colorado

Queer Migrations, Part 2: Coming and Going: Traversing Borders and Crossing Boundaries of Sexuality, Race, and Class in the 20th-Century United States and Germany
Crystal Ballroom B (Hilton Atlanta, First Floor)

• Chair: Amanda H. Littauer, Northern Illinois University
• A Queer Destination: Postwar Mobility, Migrations, and Vacations, Jerry Watkins, Georgia State University
• Movement and Morality: Mass Media and Queer Travel in 1960s and 1970s West Germany, Svanur Pétursson, Rutgers University
• “It Takes Only One…”: Transgressions of Race, Class, and Sexuality in Sumner Welles’ America, Chris Parkes, London School of Economics and Political Science
• Picking up the Sheets: Black Bodies and Civil Rights at the Postwar American Roadside, Cara Rodway, Eccles Centre for American Studies, British Library

Women and Religious Change: From Early Modern England to Modern America
International Ballroom 2 (Atlanta Marriott Marquis, International Level)

• Chair: R. Ward Holder, Saint Anselm College
• Women Be Silent? The Impact of the Reformation on Pauline Writings about Women in English Sermons, Beth Allison Barr, Baylor University
• “The Lyftynge Uppe of a Pure Mynde”: Reforming Women and Women’s Prayers in 16th-Century England, Taylor Sims, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
• The Housewife’s “Frustrations”: Southern Baptist Women and the Feminine Mystique, Adina Johnson, Baylor University

“Sisters Unite!” Transnational Women’s Rights and Social Justice Activism in the Long 19th Century
Room 202 (Hilton Atlanta, Second Floor)

• Chair: Britta Waldschmidt-Nelson, German Historical Institute
• Commentator: Jan J. Jansen, German Historical Institute
• “A Rare Colored Bird”: Mary Church Terrell as an Agent for US Democracy in the Transnational Women’s Movement, 1888–1918, Noaquia N. Callahan, University of Iowa
• Dorothea Dix: 19th-Century Ambassador for the Insane, Sonya Michel, University of Maryland at College Park
• Connecting International Networks: Hedvig Gebhard in the Women’s Movement and the Cooperative Movement, Ann-Catrin Östman, Åbo Akademi University

African American Girls and Global Citizenship in the 20th Century
Room 206 (Hilton Atlanta, Second Floor)

• Chair: Corinne Field, University of Virginia
• Commentator: Rachel Devlin, Rutgers University-New Brunswick
• New Negro Girlhood: Race, Gender, and Material Culture, LaKisha Michelle Simmons, University at Buffalo (State University of New York)
• The Right to Wear Silk: Black College Girls, Gendered Discourse, and the Student Protests of the 1920s, Amira Rose Davis, Johns Hopkins University
• Becoming Ambassadors and Future Leaders: Black Girl Citizenship in Postwar America, Miya Carey, Rutgers University-New Brunswick
• Black Girl Politics in the Era of Black Power: A Local Study of Detroit, Dara Walker, Rutgers University-New Brunswick
  

5:00 pm – 6:30 pm

Borderlands and Frontiers Studies Committee Meeting: Frontiers of Borderlands History: Gender, Nation, and Empire
International Ballroom 7 (Atlanta Marriott Marquis, International Level)

Saturday, January 9
9:00 am – 11:00 am

Domesticity in World Comparative Perspective: Gender and Labor, Colonies and Nations
Crystal Ballroom C (Hilton Atlanta, First Floor)

• Chair and commentator: Mrinalini Sinha, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
• Domestic Servitude, Gender Discourses, and the Nation: Examining the Widening Gap Between Domestic Servants and Debt Peons in Ecuador, 1850–1950, Erin E. O’Connor, Bridgewater State University
• “The Homes of Entire Strangers”: Native American and Aboriginal Servants in White Homes in 20th-Century Australia and the United States, Victoria Haskins, University of Newcastle
• “Keep Them in the Path of Duty”: Domestic Advice Manuals and the Servant/Mistress Relationship across Metropole and Colony, Fae Dussart, University of Sussex
• Subalternity and Manhood: Male Caregivers in Late Colonial India, Swapna M. Banerjee, Brooklyn College, City University of New York

Queer Migrations, Part 3: Encounters of Empire: Gender, Sexuality, and US Militarism
Crystal Ballroom B (Hilton Atlanta, First Floor)

• Chair: Judy T. Wu, University of California, Irvine
• Commentator: Emily K. Hobson, University of Nevada, Reno
• Sex, Hygiene, and Public Health: Medicalizing American Militarism Abroad, Khary O. Polk, Amherst College
• Gender Troubling the Postwar: Military-Service Activism before Mccarthy, Mattachine, and Montgomery, Tejasvi Nagaraja, New York University
• Queer Women in the Service of Empire: Gender, Sexuality, and US Servicewomen in Iraq and Afghanistan, Elizabeth Mesok, Harvard University

11:30 am – 1:30 pm

Gendering the Trans-Pacific World: Diaspora, Empire, and Race
Grand Ballroom D (Hilton Atlanta, Second Floor)

• Chair: Judy T. Wu, University of California, Irvine
• Commentator: Natsuki Aruga, Saitama University and 2015 Honorary Foreign Member
• New Analyses of Asian Settler Colonialism through the Lens of the Gendered Trans-Pacific World, Karen J. Leong, Arizona State University
• Women’s Civilizing Mission and Globalization in the Pacific, Rumi Yasutake, Konan University
• Korean Gendered Diaspora: Rethinking Forced and Voluntary Women’s Migration, Ji-Yeon Yuh, Northwestern University
• Mapping Interracial Sex and Hybridity across the 20th-Century Pacific, Mary T. Lui, Yale University

The Longue Durée of Women’s Slavery: Comparing the Slave Experience across Time and Place
Room A601 (Atlanta Marriott Marquis, Atrium Level)

• Chair: Mariana Muaze, Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro
• The Prestige Makers: Greek Slave Women in Ancient Indian Harems—Attendants, Courtesans, and “Amazon” Armed Body Guards, Kathryn Hain, University of Utah
• Two Competing Narratives of Slave Prostitutes in Early Islam, Elizabeth Urban, West Chester University
• Slaves in the Households of the ‘âmma of the Mamluk Kingdom, Evan Metzger, University of California, Los Angeles
• Reconsidering the Slave Community: Domestic Abuse and Sexual Violence in the African Diaspora, Tyler Dunsdon Parry, California State University, Fullerton
• Female Bodies and Freedom: Liberated African Women and Their Children in 19th-Century Cuba and Brazil, Jennifer Nelson, University of Leeds

Queer Migrations, Part 4: Moving People: Unsettling Circuits of Sexual Politics
Crystal Ballroom B (Hilton Atlanta, First Floor)

• Chair and commentator: Jennifer Evans, Carleton University
• “A Very Enjoyable Stay in Gay Paree”: African American Women Performers and Queer Interracial Circuits in the Jazz Age, Cookie Woolner, Kalamazoo College
• Toward an Intimate Atlantic: Transnational Precursors to Postwar Homophile Activism, David Minto, Princeton University
• The Posthumous World Journeys of a Sexologist: Analyzing the Transnational Historiographic Embrace of Magnus Hirschfeld, Kirsten Leng, University of Massachusetts Amherst
• Changing Notions of Citizenship and Internationalism in Mexico City’s Lesbian and Gay Movement, 1979–91, Lucinda C. Grinnell, University of New Mexico

Making a Place for Women: The YWCA’s Quest to Create Christian Community, 1890–1970
International Ballroom 1 (Atlanta Marriott Marquis, International Level)

• Chair and commentator: Nancy Marie Robertson, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis
• Building a Space for Christian Women: YWCA Buildings and the Creation of Global Community, Karen E. Phoenix, Washington State University
• Compromising Situations: Fundamentalism and Modernism in the Early 20th-Century YWCA, Andrea L. Turpin, Baylor University
• “Total Desegregation and Integration”: The YWCA and Christian Women’s Fellowship in the 1950s and 1960s, Abigail Sara Lewis, Barnard College, Columbia University

2:30 pm – 4:30 pm

Queer Migrations, Part 5: Rent Boys, Prostitutes, Hustlers: Anxieties and Economies of Male Same-Sex Sexual Commerce in Britain, Ireland, and Canada
Crystal Ballroom B (Hilton Atlanta, First Floor)

• Chair and commentator: Charles J. Upchurch, Florida State University
• Unintended Networks and Tapped Wires: Male Prostitution in the Making of an Information Service Economy, Katie A. Hindmarch-Watson, Colorado State University
• “Perfidious Official Guardians”: Ireland, the Nation, and Same-Sex Prostitution, Jonathan E. Coleman, University of Kentucky
• “For a Few Bob”: Rent Boys and the Judicial and Economic Systems of 20th-Century Dublin, Averill E. Earls, University at Buffalo (State University of New York)
• “Evil Is in the Eyes of the Beholder”: Commercialized Male Same-Sex Sexual Activity and Venereal Disease in Vancouver’s Bathhouse Debates, Richard A. McKay, University of Cambridge

Transforming Women’s History: Leila Rupp—Scholar, Editor, and Mentor
Room 212 (Hilton Atlanta, Second Floor)

• Chair: Leigh Ann Wheeler, Binghamton University (State University of New York) and Journal of Women’s History
• Francisca de Haan, Central European University
• Joanne Meyerowitz, Yale University
• Judy T. Wu, University of California, Irvine
• Susan Freeman, Western Michigan University

New Approaches to the History of Gender and Sexuality in Modern Italy
Room 202 (Hilton Atlanta, Second Floor)

• Chair and commentator: Mary S. Gibson, City University of New York, Graduate Center
• Sex Tourism in 19th-Century Italy, Chiara Beccalossi, Oxford Brookes University
• “Contro Natura”: Homosexual Acts in Liberal Italy, Mark Seymour, University of Otago
• Translating Feminism in the 1970s Magazine Effe, Penelope Morris, University of Glasgow
• Policing Women: The Polizia Femminile, 1959–83, Molly Tambor, Long Island University

Sunday, January 10

8:30 am – 10:30 am

Historians Reflect on Solidarity Delegations to Palestine: Intersections of Colonialism, Race, Class, Gender, Sexuality, and Nation
Salon A (Hilton Atlanta, Second Floor)

• Chair and commentator: Jesse Benjamin, Kennesaw State University
• Premilla Nadasen, Barnard College, Columbia University
• Barbara Ransby, University of Illinois at Chicago
• Beverly Sheftall, Spelman College
• Robyn Spencer, Lehman College, City University of New York

Queer Migrations, Part 6: Sexuality, Migration, and Urban Space across the Modern World
Crystal Ballroom B (Hilton Atlanta, First Floor)

• Chair: Carina E. Ray, Brandeis University
• Saheed A. Aderinto, Western Carolina University
• Clayton Howard, Ohio State University
• Durba Mitra, Fordham University
• Andrew Israel Ross, University of Southern Mississippi

Families and Communities in the Early Modern Atlantic Empires
Room A704 (Atlanta Marriott Marquis, Atrium Level)

• Chair: Kristen Block, University of Tennessee at Knoxville
• Commentator: Bianca Premo, Florida International University
• Orphans and Foundlings in the Data Regime of Late Colonial New Spain, Norah Andrews, Northern Arizona University
• “Common in All Goods”: White Women and Property in Saint-Domingue, Jennifer L. Palmer, University of Georgia
• Family, Politics, and the Origins of the Haitian Revolution, Robert Taber, University of Florida
• Aging and Antislavery: Old Slaves and Questions of Family in the Anglo-Atlantic Abolition Movement, Daniel Livesay, Claremont McKenna College

“Struggle” and “Resistance” in African American Women’s History
Room 309/310 (Hilton Atlanta, Third Floor)

• Chair: Judith Giesberg, Villanova University
• Cynthia R. Greenlee, Pennsylvania State University
  
• Chris Hayashida-Knight, Pennsylvania State University
  
• Kellie Carter Jackson, Hunter College, City University of New York

11:00 am – 1:00 pm

Queer Migrations, Part 7: Traversing Boundaries: Sexual Citizenship, Trans/National Identities, and Political Movements
Crystal Ballroom B (Hilton Atlanta, First Floor)

• Chair: John Howard, King’s College London
• Commentator: Jerry Watkins, Georgia State University
• Migrating Memories: Transatlantic Commemoration of the Nazis’ Homosexual Victims in West Germany and the United States, W. Jake Newsome, University at Buffalo (State University of New York)
• “Male Virility Is a Cultural Tradition”: Anita Bryant, Miami’s Cuban American Community, and the Rise of the New Right, Julio Capó Jr., University of Massachusetts Amherst
• Consensual Kissing Is Not Sodomy: The Policing of Homo/Sexuality and the Defense of the Normal Heart in Southwest Missouri, Elisabeth Frances George, University at Buffalo (State University of New York)

Finding Feminisms: New Perspectives of Women’s Movements in the American South
Crystal Ballroom A (Hilton Atlanta, First Floor)

• Chair and commentator: Chana Kai Lee, University of Georgia
• Survival and Economic Issues Are Women’s Issues: Feminism in the Appalachian South in the 1970s, Jessica Wilkerson, University of Mississippi
• Black, Celibate, and Feminist? Black Catholic Nuns and the Politics of Self-Determination in the American South in Slavery and Freedom, Shannen Dee Williams, University of Tennessee at Knoxville
• Whose Civil Rights? Abortion Politics and Historical Narrative in Atlanta, 1970–2010, Cynthia Greenlee, Pennsylvania State University
• Latina Feministas: The Historical Legacies of Latina Activism in the Nuevo South, 1930–41, Sarah J. McNamara, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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