CUNY DIGITAL HISTORY ARCHIVE

This poster promotes a conference entitled Lesbian and Gay History: Defining a Field, which was held by CLAGS in association with the Doctoral Program in History at the CUNY Graduate Center on October 6th and 7th, 1995. As the name suggests, this conference took on the task of helping to shape the still-developing field of lesbian and gay history. Topics of discussion included the role and importance of archives, how to teach lesbian and gay history, and a number of biographies of queer individuals. Among the speakers were George Chauncey, whose book Gay New York offers an in-depth look at New York City’s queer communities from 1890-1940 and Polly Thistlethwaite, an archivist, who has worked in the library at the CUNY Graduate Center since 2002 and became Chief Librarian in 2011.

Although formally instituted at the CUNY Graduate Center in 1991, CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies was first conceived 5 years earlier by Martin, Duberman, one of the first historians to embrace the, then infantile, field of Queer Studies. Duberman sensed the need for a formal center devoted to queer research. As the first university-based center for LGBTQ research, CLAGS continues to demonstrate its dedication to advancing Queer Studies, by hosting public events showcasing queer research and sponsoring fellowships to support queer scholars. Among its many notable contributions, CLAGS annually puts on at least one major conference and holds the Kessler Award Lecture every fall to celebrate a queer scholar who has made a notable contribution to the field of queer studies.