This virtual roundtable celebrates the launch of Trans Historical: Gender Plurality Before the Modern (Cornell University Press, 2021), a multidisciplinary edited collection that explores the politics, poetics, and aesthetics of trans histories prior to modernity. The book argues for an expansive understanding of trans pasts and foregrounds a range of methodologies that acknowledge the plurality of gender experiences in early sources and material records. Essays highlight pre-normative understandings of gender that flourished in the medieval and early modern worlds in a wide range of locations from colonial North America to Renaissance Poland, from Byzantine and Ottoman Greece and Turkey to Korea.

Speakers

Gabrielle Bychowski, Case Western University
Anna Kłosowska, Miami University
Greta LaFleur, Yale University
Masha Raskolnikov, Cornell University
Blake Gutt, University of Michigan, Moderator