Event details

The Humanities Council’s Fall 2026 Gauss Seminars in Criticism will be presented by Roderick Ferguson, William Robertson Coe Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Professor of American Studies at Yale University. His visit will comprise of two public lectures, under the general title “On Destruction and Survival.”

Lecture 1: “The Bookshop of Black Queer Diaspora: On Terror and the Difficult Miracle of Critical Intellection”
Wednesday, October 7
5:00 – 7:00 pm
Betts Auditorium

Lecture 2: “The Bookshop of Black Queer Diaspora: Aurality against Fascism”
Thursday, October 8
5:00 – 7:00 pm
Betts Auditorium

An experimental and conceptual text, The Bookshop of Black Queer Diaspora is comprised of a series of fictional visits to a make-a-believe black queer bookshop and art gallery. The bookshop, however, is made up of actual artifacts that invoke the real histories of black queer art and activism, their responses to the ongoing legacies of colonialism and slavery as well as their manifestations in neoliberal and fascist formations.