Five color portraits of the Spring 2022 speakers. design by Joshua Zuniga.

Trans Studies Speaker Series

The logo of the Mills College Trans Studies Speaker Series — Red lips, White teeth, a series shapes like irises Hazel, Blue, Pink, White, and a Brown fist raised.The Mills College Trans Studies Speaker Series, hosted by Emmy-Award winner Susan Stryker, Barbara Lee Distinguished Chair in Women's Leadership, offers a regular public forum for exploring transgender issues with some of today's leading thinkers, artists, and activists. All Trans Studies Speaker Series events are being held online and are free and open to the public. 

The Trans Studies Speaker Series is co-sponsored by Trans Studies @ Mills College, Distinguished Chair Susan Stryker, Mills Performing Arts, and the History and Race, Gender and Sexuality Studies departments at Mills College.

All events are presented in conjunction with We Are The Voices, a Mellon Foundation Higher Learning funded project linking Mills College students and faculty with poets and scholars working in Oakland and beyond.

For more information, email transspeakerseries@mills.edu.

Spring 2022 Trans Studies Speaker Series Events

Temporary Utopias: Discussing the Films of Cary Cronenwett
Thursday, February 17, 2022 | 5:00 PM PST

The Wrong End of The Telescope: a conversation with Rabih Alameddine and Susan Stryker
Thursday, March 31, 2022 | 5:00 PM PST

Volatile Contexts: Identity, Technology and Politics in a Moment of Danger
Wednesday April 13, 2022 | 7:00 PM PST

About Susan Stryker

Portrait of Susan StrykerSusan Stryker holds the Barbara Lee Distinguished Chair in Women's Leadership at Mills College, 2020–22. She is professor emerita of gender and women's studies at the University of Arizona and was a Presidential Fellow at Yale University in 2019–20.

An award-winning scholar and filmmaker whose historical research, theoretical writing, and creative works have helped shape the cultural conversation on transgender topics since the early 1990s, Stryker earned her PhD in United States history at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1992. She later held a Ford Foundation/Social Science Research Council post-doctoral fellowship in sexuality studies at Stanford University, and has been a distinguished visiting faculty member at Harvard University; Yale University; Northwestern University; Johns Hopkins University; University of California, Santa Cruz; Macquarie University in Sydney; and Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.

Stryker is the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of numerous books and anthologies, including Gay by the Bay: A History of Queer Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area (Chronicle 1996), Queer Pulp: Perverse Passions in the Golden Age of the Paperback (Chronicle 2000), The Transgender Studies Reader (Routledge 2006), The Transgender Studies Reader 2 (Routledge 2013), and Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution (Seal Press 2008, 2017).

Stryker's accolades include an Emmy Award for the documentary film Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton's Cafeteria (Frameline/ITVS 2005), a Lambda Literary Award for the co-edited anthology The Transgender Studies Reader (Routledge 2006), and the Ruth Benedict Book Prize for co-edited anthology The Transgender Studies Reader 2 (Routledge 2013). She is founding co-editor of the academic journal TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. In addition to developing and consulting on various media projects, Stryker’s current work in process is Changing Gender: A Trans History of North America, under contract to Farrar Straus Giroux.