The goal of the project is to facilitate doctoral candidates’ development of their dissertations, provide doctoral researchers the opportunity to present their work to an international scholarly audience, enable access to key international archives, and develop and consolidate international networks and scholarly exchange between both faculty and doctoral candidates.

In a first step, five doctoral candidates from Leuphana University of Lüneburg travelled to Duke University in March 2024 where they participated in a two-day workshop with three doctoral candidates from Duke University and one from the Global History program at the Freie Universität Berlin. The workshop was also joined by Dr. Zavier Nunn, Duke University Postdoctoral Associate in Histories of the Transgender Present. The nine doctoral candidates each delivered 20-minute talks based on one of their dissertation chapters (or another piece of writing) as well as a ten-minute critical response to one of the talks. In a second step in the exchange, participants will develop their talks into a draft chapter or article to be circulated ahead of a workshop in Lüneburg in June for critical feedback and development.

The workshop was accompanied by a visit to the Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick papers housed at Duke University’s Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture (Sedgwick was a founding figure of Queer Studies based at Duke) and participation in the 17th Feminist Theory Workshop, an annual event featuring leading global scholars in the field and hosted by the Duke University Program in Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies.

The Lüneburg workshop will also be accompanied by a full program of events, including a visit to the Schwules Museum Berlin archives and two public lectures at Leuphana University.

Professor Rosenberg will give a lecture titled, “On the Madness of Dr. Hubert Dana Goodale: Animal Agriculture, Experimental Endocrinology, and the Industrial Ecology of Sex in Early 20th Century America” on 25 June, 2024, at 6:15pm in C 40.704. For more information, click here.
Dr. Nunn will deliver a lecture immediately beforehand, in the Kunstraum at 4:15pm also on Tuesday 25 June. His lecture will address, “Trans Liminalities: Histories from Weimar and Nazi Germany”. For more information, click here.

A second edition of the Duke University – Leuphana University Gender, Queer and Transgender Studies Workshop for Doctoral Candidates is planned for 2025. It is generously supported by the Cultures of Critique DFG research training group, the research initiative on the Disruptive Condition, at the Institute for Philosophy and Art History (IPK) in the School of Culture and Society, and the Duke University program in Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies.