Queer Places, Practices, and Lives: A Symposium in Honor of Samuel Steward

The Ohio State University
Columbus, OH
May 18-19, 2012

Confirmed speakers
Joseph Boone, Tim Dean, Kale Fajardo, Roderick Ferguson, Brian Glavey, Scott Herring, Eithne Lubhéid, Victor Mendoza, Deborah Miranda, José Esteban Muñoz, Hoang Tan Nguyen, Juana Marí­a Rodrí­guez, Nayan Shah, Justin Spring, Susan Stryker, Shane Vogel
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We invite proposals for the inaugural queer studies conference at The Ohio State University. The title is meant as an expansive call to consider a host of issues evoked by queer places (local/global, urban/rural, North/South, East/West, public/private, mobility/immobility …), queer practices (sexual cultures, expressive cultures, political activism, academic work …), and queer lives (biography, hagiography, psychology, sexology, history, development …). We envision the conference as an opportunity both to take stock of inter/disciplinary trends as well as provoke new ideas and frameworks for future work.

The inspiration for this expansiveness and reevaluation is Samuel Steward, an OSU alum of the 1930s and the subject of Justin Spring’s critically acclaimed biography Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade (2010). As a literary studies academic, writer, and visual and tattoo artist, Steward lived a highly varied life, coming into contact, and in some cases forming long-lasting friendships, with such figures as Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Thornton Wilder, André Gide, Thomas Mann, Alfred Kinsey, Albert Camus, Christopher Isherwood, George Platt Lynes, and Paul Cadmus. As something of a gay Casanova (and a scrupulous archivist of his sexual encounters), Steward also “linked in,” as he might say, with such movie stars as Rudolf Valentino and Rock Hudson.

In 1995, Steward’s estate donated funds to the OSU English department to further research in LGBTQscholarship, but these funds have only recently been “rediscovered.” To pay tribute to this queer Buckeye who studied at, taught at, and invested in OSU, we are taking our points of departure for panel themes from Steward’s life and work.