Queer History at Brandeis
Over the summer of 2018, graduate students in the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Department at Brandeis University began working on a project designed to locate, archive and highlight the university's decades of queer history. Thanks to the archives of the Justice, researchers were able to find documentation of LGBTQ+ activities and communities on campus stretching back as far as 1957, and began assembling an oral queer history by interviewing Brandeis alumni. The first wave of research has been collected in this timeline with plans to bring more events, more stories and more remarkable people to light.
View Accessible Version of This Timeline
Podcast
A limited run podcast examining and showcasing Brandeis' queer history is now available through SoundCloud. The podcast features the voices of LGBTQ alumni and faculty as collected in oral history interviews, in addition to drawing on documents from the university archives. The interviews and documents are part of a larger special collection assembled by the WGS Department since 2018 for the purpose of recognizing queer history on campus. If you would like to share a story for this project, please email wgstudies@brandeis.edu.
Podcast Episodes
- Episode 1: Painting the Town Rainbow
- Episode 2: Live and Learn
- Episode 3: Queer There and Everywhere
Thanks to the Robert D. Farber University Archives and Special Collections and the archives of the Justice.
Project Team: Rebecca Barton (GS), Wendy Cadge, Jay Collay ('22), Shannon Kearns, Samantha Leonard (GS), Wren Li ('22), Madeline Scranton ('20), Riley Thomas (GS)
With thanks to our oral history participants: Amy Agigian (GS), Anushka Aquil '12, Noah Brandman '03, Professor Bernadette Brooten, Christian Churchill (GS), Lisa Borten '07, Al Ittelson '06, Artemio Miguel Jongco III '97, Professor Tom King