Before 1933, Germany was a center of LGBT+ community and culture, with several renowned organizations serving and supporting trans and gender non-conforming people. Hitler’s Nazi government, however, brutally targeted the trans community, deporting many trans people to concentration camps and wiping out vibrant community structures. As transgender people are now increasingly targets of discriminatory legislation and hate, join the Museum for a program exploring these stories and experiences prior to and during the Holocaust.
This panel conversation will feature Dr. Anna Hájková, Associate Professor of Modern European Continental History at the University of Warwick; Dr. Katie Sutton, Associate Professor of German and Gender Studies, School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics at Australian National University; and Dr. Bodie A. Ashton, a Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer at Universität Erfurt, with moderator Rabbi Marisa Elana James, Director of Social Justice Programming at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah in New York.
Dr. Anna Hájková is Associate Professor of Modern European Continental History at the University of Warwick. In addition to her academic work, Dr. Hájková is a queer history activist and public intellectual. Her first book, The Last Ghetto: An Everyday History of Theresienstadt, was published in 2020.
Dr. Katie Sutton is Associate Professor of German and Gender Studies, School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics at Australian National University. She studies German culture, literature, and history in the 20th and 21st centuries, and focuses on the history of gender and sexuality. Dr. Sutton’s most recent monograph, Sex between Body and Mind: Psychoanalysis and Sexology in the German-speaking World, 1890s-1930s, was published in 2019.
Dr. Bodie A. Ashton is a Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer at Universität Erfurt, where he is working on the Volkswagen Stiftung-funded research project “The Other Global Germany: Transnational Criminality and Deviant Globalisation in Germany.” Dr. Ashton’s research focuses on the construction and understanding of historical queer, and, particularly transgender and gender non-conforming identities in modern German history. His first monograph, The Kingdom of Württemberg and the Making of Germany, 1815-1871, was published in 2017.
Rabbi Marisa Elana James is the Director of Social Justice Programming at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah (CBST). She is a graduate of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. Before coming to CBST, Rabbi James helped create and lead the rabbinical student program for T’ruah: The Rabbinical call for Human Rights.
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