Transgender scholar C. Riley Snorton is the featured speaker for the latest installment of the Dean’s Diversity Lecture Series at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College of education and human development.
The lecture, “Jorgensen’s Shadows,” takes place Tuesday, Jan. 26, at 7:15 p.m. in the Rotunda of the Wyatt Center, 1930 South Drive, Nashville. It is free and open to the public.
Snorton, assistant professor in Africana studies and feminist, gender and sexuality studies at Cornell University, will discuss the ways gender and sexual aberrance are cast as both revelatory and somehow intrinsic to blackness, through the lens of news stories about Christine Jorgensen, transgender sensation of the 1950s.
The Dean’s Diversity Lecture Series was launched last fall by Camilla Benbow, Patricia and Rodes Hart Dean of Education and Human Development.
“This lecture series is intended to introduce new voices and broaden our understanding of the challenges some face; challenges that many of us never encounter,” Benbow said. “Professor Snorton’s research, which examines a problematic intersection of race and gender articulation, is timely and provocative.”