Jules Gill-Peterson (Johns Hopkins University, History), a Professor of Transgender History, Politics, and Medicine, offers a history of how poor trans women of color -- especially in the 1960's -- create knowledge through the lived experience, with an emphasis on figures such as Sylvia Rivera, Jennie June, and Marsha P. Johnson. *Full Lecture Abstract:* Gill-Peterson interrogates the idealized separation between medico-scientific knowledge and vernacular trans lived experience as more truthful historical evidence. Focusing on figural and ephemeral poor trans women of color in the 1960s whose lives transpired primarily on the street, who did sex work, and who formed social bonds to address violence as well as transition DIY, Gill-Peterson argues that the authoritative archives of transsexual medicine, social services and the police, and the political reclamation of trans people telling their own stories all participate in the construction of trans women of color’s “experience,” rather than the former serving as its occlusion and the latter its salvation. This event was hosted by Imagining Trans Futures, a Cross-Disciplinary Research Cluster at The Walter G. Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities co-led by Ching-In Chen and Neil Simpkins (University of Washington, Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences). Chapters: 11:15 “Another Scum Manifesto,” or an Overview of Trans Women of Color Archive as Fixture of “the Street” 23:00 “Idealizing Trans Women of Color” 24:00 “Everybody knows, Everybody knows,” or Understanding Poor Trans Women of Color Lived Experience as Neither Tragic nor Idealized *More about "Imagining Trans Futures":* ✔ https://simpsoncenter.org/projects/imagining-trans-futures *More about Jules-Gill-Peterson":* Jules Gill-Peterson is an associate professor of History at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Histories of the Transgender Child (2018, Minnesota Press), winner of a Lambda Literary Award. She also serves as General Co-Editor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. Dr. Gill-Peterson is currently at work on a book project entitled Gender Underground: A Trans History of DIY. *Visit Gill-Peterson's Website"* ✔ https://www.jgillpeterson.com/ The Simpson Center for the Humanities is the proud sponsor of this event. Captioning was provided through 3Play Media services. Video editing was provided by Communications Manager at the Simpson Center, C. R. Grimmer. *Subscribe to the Simpson Center YouTube Channel:* ✔ https://www.youtube.com/c/simpsoncenter?sub_confirmation=1 *Follow the Simpson Center Social Media:* ✔ https://twitter.com/simpsoncenter​ ✔ https://www.instagram.com/simpson.cen... ✔ https://www.facebook.com/simpsoncenter​ *More on the Simpson Center for the Humanities:* ✔ https://simpsoncenter.org/

David Shields, best-selling author and UW English Professor, argues for "evolution beyond the narrative." In Shields' summary of htis talk: "Art, not to mention life, now seems to happen primarily in liminal spaces, edited, quoted and quoted again and recontextualized, replaced, collaged, stitched together anew. The stitching together anew is what I really care about. The novel is dead; long live the anti-novel and the un-novel, built from scraps. I’m not interested in collage as the refuge of the compositionally disabled. I’m interested in collage as an evolution beyond narrative. A great painting comes together, just barely. These fragments I have shored against my ruins. Collage is the primary art form of the twenty-first century." This Katz Distinguished Lecture in the Humanities took place Fall 2018. More information on this talk is available at: ✔ https://simpsoncenter.org/news/2016/10/david-shields-novel-dead-long-live-anti-novel-nov-15. *Learn more about the series and The Simpson Center:* ✔ https://simpsoncenter.org/programs/katz-distinguished-lectures-humanities ✔ https://simpsoncenter.org/ *Stay updated on related events on social media:* ✔ https://twitter.com/simpsoncenter ✔ https://www.instagram.com/simpson.center ✔ https://www.facebook.com/simpsoncenter *Speaker bio* David Shields is the internationally bestselling author of twenty-three books, including Reality Hunger (recently named one of the 100 most important books of the last decade by LitHub), The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead (New York Times bestseller), Black Planet (finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), and Other People: Takes & Mistakes (NYTBR Editors’ Choice). Nobody Hates Trump More Than Trump: An Intervention was published in 2018; The Trouble With Men: Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power appeared in 2019. James Franco’s film adaptation of I Think You’re Totally Wrong: A Quarrel, which Shields co-wrote and co-stars in, was released in 2017 (available now on Amazon Prime, iTunes/Apple TV, Vudu, Vimeo, Kanopy, and Google Play). Shields wrote, produced, and directed Lynch: A History, a 2019 documentary about Marshawn Lynch’s use of silence, echo, and mimicry as key tools of resistance (rave reviews in the New Yorker, Nation, and dozens of other publications; film festival awards all over the world; available now on Sundance TV/AMC, Amazon Prime, iTunes/Apple TV, Google Play, etc.). A recipient of Guggenheim and NEA fellowships and a senior contributing editor of Conjunctions, Shields has published fiction and nonfiction in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Esquire, Yale Review, Salon, Slate, Tin House, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Believer, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Best American Essays. His work has been translated into two dozen languages. More about David Shields at: https://davidshields.com/biography

Alondra Nelson, 2020 Deputy Director for Science and Society for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Harold F. Linder Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, and president of the Social Science Research Council, discusses the billion-dollar industry of genetic testing has spawned popular television shows, websites, and a booming heritage tourism circuit. African Americans' interest in genetic ancestry testing has been especially robust. DNA-based techniques are being used to grapple with the unfinished business of slavery: to foster reconciliation, to establish ties with ancestral homelands, to rethink citizenship, and to make legal claims for slavery reparations. For good and for naught, the double helix has wound its way into the heart of some of the most urgent contemporary social issues around race. This Katz Distinguished Lecture in the Humanities is part of “Capitalism and Comparative Racialization,” a 2017-2018 John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Cultures funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. More at: ✔ https://simpsoncenter.org/programs/katz-distinguished-lectures-humanities/alondra-nelson *Learn more about the series and The Simpson Center:* ✔ https://simpsoncenter.org/programs/katz-distinguished-lectures-humanities ✔ https://simpsoncenter.org/ *Stay updated on related events on social media:* ✔ https://twitter.com/simpsoncenter ✔ https://www.instagram.com/simpson.center ✔ https://www.facebook.com/simpsoncenter *Speaker bio* A scholar of science, technology, medicine, and social inequality, Alondra Nelson is the Harold F. Linder Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, an independent research center in Princeton, New Jersey, and president of the Social Science Research Council. She currently serves as Deputy Director for Science and Society for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Nelson was previously professor of sociology at Columbia University, where she also served as the inaugural Dean of Social Science. Nelson began her academic career on the faculty of Yale University, and there was recognized with the Poorvu Prize for interdisciplinary teaching excellence. She has published award-winning, widely acclaimed books and articles. Nelson is currently at work on a book about science and technology policy in the Obama administration; "Society after Pandemic," an essay collection; and new research exploring the sociology of bioethics. Her writing has been translated into Arabic and French. She is the author of The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation after the Genome. Her books also include Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination, as well as Genetics and the Unsettled Past: The Collision of DNA, Race, and History (with Keith Wailoo and Catherine Lee), and Technicolor: Race, Technology, and Everyday Life (with Thuy Linh Tu). In 2002, Nelson edited “Afrofuturism,” an influential special issue of Social Text, drawing together contributions from scholars and artists who were members of a synonymous online community she established in 1998. She has held visiting professorships and fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the BIOS Centre at the London School of Economics, the Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies, and the Bavarian American Academy. Her research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the National Science Foundation. Nelson has contributed to national policy discussions on inequality and the social implications of new technologies, including artificial intelligence, big data, and human gene-editing. Her essays, reviews, and commentary have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Nature, Le Nouvel Observateur, and on National Public Radio, BBC Radio, the New Yorker Radio Hour, and PBS Newshour, among other venues. Nelson is a member of the National Academy of Medicine (NAM), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. She was co-chair of the NAM Committee on Emerging Science, Technology and Innovation and was a member of the National Academy of Engineering Committee on Responsible Computing Research. Nelson serves as an advisor to the Obama Presidency Oral History Project. She is a director of the Center for Research Libraries and the Brotherhood/Sister Sol, a Harlem-based youth development organization. She has served on the boards of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Teagle Foundation, USIU: Africa, Data & Society, and the Rockefeller Archive Center.

Lorrain Daston, celebrated historian of science, Director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and Visiting Professor of Social Thought and History at the University of Chicago, speaks on "Algorithms Before Computers: Patterns, Recipes, and Rules." Rules—in the form of everything from traffic regulations to computer algorithms—structure almost every human interaction. These are rigid, precise, explicit rules that minimize interpretation. But the long history of rules before the modern era reveals an alternative and more supple kind of rule: the rule as pattern or paradigm, which requires the exercise of judgment, even in mathematics. How did we get from there to here, and what are the implications of this transformation for the way we live now? Presented at the University of Washington, Seattle Simpson Center for the Humanities as a Katz Distinguished Lecture in the Humanities in Spring 2017. More information available at: ✔ https://simpsoncenter.org/news/2017/03/lorraine-daston-algorithms-computers-april-19. *Learn more about the series and The Simpson Center:* ✔ https://simpsoncenter.org/programs/katz-distinguished-lectures-humanities ✔ https://simpsoncenter.org/ *Stay updated on related events on social media:* ✔ https://twitter.com/simpsoncenter ✔ https://www.instagram.com/simpson.center ✔ https://www.facebook.com/simpsoncenter *Speaker bio* Lorraine Daston has published on a wide range of topics in the history of science, including the history of probability and statistics, wonders in early modern science, the emergence of the scientific fact, scientific models, objects of scientific inquiry, the moral authority of nature, and the history of scientific objectivity. Recent books include Gegen die Natur (2018; English edition Against Nature, 2019) as well as Science in the Archives (2017) and (with Paul Erikson et al.) How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality (2014), the latter two both products of MPIWG Working Groups. Her current projects include a history of rules, the meaning of modernity in the history of science, international governance in science since the late nineteenth century, and the relationship between moral and natural orders. She is the recipient of the Pfizer Prize and Sarton Medal of the History of Science Society, the Schelling Prize of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, the Lichtenberg Medal of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences, the Luhmann Prize of the University of Bielefeld, and honorary doctorates from Princeton University and the Hebrew University. In 2018 she was awarded the Dan David Prize in the History of Science. In addition to directing Department II of the MPIWG, she is a regular Visiting Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and Permanent Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

Kelley, a preeminent US historian, explains racial capitalism and the making of global capitalism over the course of the last 700 years. Kelley then turns to a meditation on fascism, not as an aberration but as a direct outgrowth of modern racial capitalism, and reflects on what all of this means now. This Katz Distinguished Lecture in the Humanities is part of “Capitalism and Comparative Racialization,” a 2017-2018 John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Cultures funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. More at https://simpsoncenter.org/kelley *Learn more about the series and The Simpson Center:* ✔ https://simpsoncenter.org/programs/katz-distinguished-lectures-humanities ✔https://simpsoncenter.org/ *Stay updated on related events on social media:* ✔ https://twitter.com/simpsoncenter ✔ https://www.instagram.com/simpson.center ✔ https://www.facebook.com/simpsoncenter *Speaker bio* Robin D. G. Kelley is Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in US History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times (2012), Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (2009), and Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (2002). His research has explored the history of social movements in the US, the African Diaspora, and Africa; black intellectuals; music; visual culture; contemporary urban studies; historiography and historical theory; poverty studies and ethnography; colonialism/imperialism; organized labor; constructions of race; Surrealism, Marxism, nationalism, among other things.

✔ The most shocking fact about the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2013-2016 was not the bloody hemorrhages the disease can cause, Paul Farmer argues in this 2018 Distinguished Katz Lecture. Nor was it the “crossover event” in which the disease enters the human species, a frequent fixation of the Western media. The most damning fact was the case-fatality rate: Nearly seventy-percent of those infected with the disease died from it. That rate barely budged over the course of the outbreak, despite unprecedented pledges of international aid. In this video, Paul Farmer, Kolokotrones University Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard University, discusses his experiences with Ebola patients in West Africa, describing the need for "staff, stuff, space, and systems" to prevent the spread of infectious disease. Read more about his visit at . This Katz Distinguished Lecture in the Humanities took place Winter 2018. Learn more about this lecture at: ✔ www.simpsoncenter.org/paul-farmer *Learn more about the series and The Simpson Center:* ✔ https://simpsoncenter.org/programs/katz-distinguished-lectures-humanities ✔ https://simpsoncenter.org/ *Stay updated on related events on social media:* ✔ https://twitter.com/simpsoncenter ✔ https://www.instagram.com/simpson.center ✔ https://www.facebook.com/simpsoncenter *Speaker bio* Medical anthropologist and physician Paul Farmer has dedicated his life to improving health care for the world's poorest people. He chairs the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine and is a founding director of Partners In Health (PIH), an international non-profit organization that since 1987 has provided direct health care services and undertaken research and advocacy activities on behalf of those who are sick and living in poverty. He also is professor of medicine and chief of the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Dr. Farmer began his lifelong commitment to Haiti in 1983 while still a student, working with dispossessed farmers in Haiti’s Central Plateau. He served there for ten years as medical director of a charity hospital, L’Hôpital Bon Sauveur. With PIH over the past twenty-six years, Dr. Farmer has led colleagues working in twelve sites throughout Haiti and twelve additional countries around the globe. For more than a decade, the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine has integrated research and teaching programs with PIH service activities, establishing direct feedbacks between clinical interventions and biosocial analyses. The work has become a model for health care for poor communities worldwide and provides the basis for developing a science of global health delivery implementation. Dr. Farmer holds an M.D. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. In addition to his leadership roles at Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Partners In Health, he is the United Nations Special Adviser to the Secretary-General on Community Based Medicine and Lessons from Haiti. Dr. Farmer is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Margaret Mead Award from the American Anthropological Association, the American Medical Association’s Outstanding International Physician (Nathan Davis) Award, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and, with his PIH colleagues, the Hilton Humanitarian Prize. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Brian M. Reed, a preeminent poetry scholar, Milliman Endowed Chair in the Humanities, and Divisional Dean of the Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington, discusses what poets have learned from avians and recounts occasions when they have taken sonic flight together, from Wordsworth, Dickinson, and Frost down to the present. In an era when the world is out of balance and earthʼs species must collaborate to survive, it becomes a pressing necessity to perfect the art of listening with care when nonhumans, too, sing: birds, like poets, sing, but poets must use words, and that makes all the difference. This Katz Distinguished Lecture in the Humanities took place Winter 2018. More information available at: ✔ https://simpsoncenter.org/news/2018/01/brian-reed-poetry-and-birds-march-1 *Learn more about the series and The Simpson Center:* ✔ https://simpsoncenter.org/programs/katz-distinguished-lectures-humanities ✔ https://simpsoncenter.org/ *Stay updated on related events on social media:* ✔ https://twitter.com/simpsoncenter ✔ https://www.instagram.com/simpson.center ✔ https://www.facebook.com/simpsoncenter *Speaker bio* Brian Reed is the Milliman Endowed Chair in the Humanities and a specialist in twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry. He is the author of three books--Hart Crane: After His Lights (2006), Phenomenal Reading: Essays on Modern and Contemporary Poetics (2012), and Nobody's Business: Twenty-First Century Avant-Garde Poetics (2013)--and the co-editor of two essay collections, Situating El Lissitzky: Vitebsk, Berlin, Moscow (2003) and Modern American Poetry: Points of Access (2013). He has published more than fifty essays and articles on image-text relations in poetry, on sound in poetry, and on poetry in relation to other arts. He is a past Chair of the Executive Committee of the Poetry and Poetics Forum of the Modern Language Association, and he has served on the Executive Board of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association. From 2014-2018, he was Chair of the Department of English.

Charles W. Mills, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center, asks, "How should political progressives relate to liberalism, the now-hegemonic global political ideology?" Mills argues we should try to retrieve liberalism, but that this will require more work than conventionally assumed. Mills articulates that once we recognize, in full depth and detail, how illiberal actual historical liberalism has been, we will need not merely to remap our conventional periodizations, but to rethink the received account and characterization of liberalism in the social contract tradition, examining in particular racial justice. This Katz Distinguished Lecture in the Humanities is part of “Capitalism and Comparative Racialization,” a 2017-2018 John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Cultures funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. More information available at: ✔ https://simpsoncenter.org/calendar?trumbaEmbed=view%3Devent%26eventid%3D124294455 *Learn more about the series and The Simpson Center:* ✔ https://simpsoncenter.org/programs/katz-distinguished-lectures-humanities ✔ https://simpsoncenter.org/ *Stay updated on related events on social media:* ✔ https://twitter.com/simpsoncenter ✔ https://www.instagram.com/simpson.center ✔ https://www.facebook.com/simpsoncenter *Speaker bio* Charles W. Mills is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at The Graduate Center, CUNY. He works in the general area of social and political philosophy, particularly in oppositional political theory as centered on class, gender, and race. He is the author of over a hundred journal articles, book chapters, comments and replies, and six books. His first book, The Racial Contract (Cornell UP, 1997), won a Myers Outstanding Book Award for the study of bigotry and human rights in America. It has been translated into Korean and Turkish. His second book, Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Cornell UP, 1998), was a finalist for the award for the most important North American work in social philosophy of that year. Other books are: From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), Contract and Domination (co-authored with Carole Pateman) (Polity, 2007), which brings the sexual and racial contracts together, and Radical Theory, Caribbean Reality (University of the West Indies Press, 2010). His most recent book is Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism (Oxford UP, 2017). Mills has also co-edited the following: Philosophy: The Big Questions (Blackwell, 2003) with Ruth Sample and James Sterba; a special issue of the Du Bois Review on "Race in a 'Postracial' Epoch" (Spring 2014) with Robert Gooding-Williams; and Simianization: Apes, Gender, Class and Race (LIT Verlag, 2015) with Wulf D. Hund and Silvia Sebastiani. Mills received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto, and previously taught at the University of Oklahoma, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Northwestern University. He was the President of the American Philosophical Association Central Division for 2017-18. In 2017, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.