Jack Halberstam visits the Centre for Gender Research
Professor Jack Halberstam was awarded the 2022 Kerstin Hesselgren visiting professorship by the Swedish Research Council, to spend time in Sweden, mainly at Lund University. However, for a week, 13-17 March 2023, the Centre for Gender Research had the pleasure and privilege of Jack Halberstam visiting, joining both formal and informal conversations on gender and queer studies.
Jack Halberstam / Photo: Del LaGrace Volcano
Jack Halberstam, Professor of Gender Studies and English at Columbia University, New York, is a queer/trans theorist and cultural studies scholar who has had a significant impact on gender and queer studies in Sweden. Indeed, professor Halberstam has been coming to Sweden for more than 20 years, on invitation from a range of actors, both in and outside of academia. Their work on female masculinity, queer temporalities, the queer art of failure, trans and feminist movements, and most recently wildness, has inspired, influenced and sometimes irritated academics, artists, and queer activists for many years.
As part of the visit to Uppsala Halberstam took part in the Centre's research seminar, taught a Masterclass for 18 PhD students from all over Scandinavia, as well as participated in the popular two-day symposium “Thinking Wildly with Jack Halberstam”. This symposium invited 25 scholars to a conversation about the state and future of queer studies and the role of Jack Halberstam’s work in the field in general and in relation to their own research. The symposium was co-sponsored by CIRCUS and fully booked.
To finish the visit, Jack Halberstam had a lecture and a conversation at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, with an audience of 300 people. This was a collaboration between the museum, Uppsala University and Radical Love: Care as Resistance.