The Queer Studies Research Workshop exists to cultivate intellectual exchange at UB among faculty and students who take human sexuality as a critical lens or object of inquiry, in every discipline and field. Our mission is to continue, defend, build on, and publicize UB’s historic strength as an institution that generates cutting-edge queer scholarship, activist engagement, and cultural production.
The first Queer Studies course was taught at UB in 1971, a mere two years after the Stonewall riots, and the university continues to have strengths in this field across the humanities disciplines.
Our workshop redefines “queer studies” as taking place not only in academia, but everywhere in public life. One of the key pieces of UB’s institutional heritage that we work to repair is the network of connections between our campus and Buffalo. Anyone who is analyzing, making visible, making art around, or agitating for the lives of queer, sexually non-conforming, and gender-non-conforming people is practicing a form of queer studies that this Research Workshop seeks to learn from. We collaborate and co-sponsor events with partner organizations including the Buffalo-Niagara LGBTQ History Project, the Dr. Madeline Davis LGBTQ Archive of Western New York at Buffalo State Library, and UB’s own Palah Light Lab.