Research Seminar: Archiving Gender, Race, and Sexuality: Emerging Histories, Archival Practices, and Politics of Display

The Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies (CIGS), the Centre for the HIstory of Ibero-Ameria, the Women, Gender, and Sexuality research group and the Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums research group are delighted to invite you to the panel ‘Archiving Gender, Race and Sexuality. Emerging Histories, Archival Practices and Politics of Display’. This event brings together CIGS’ visiting researchers, Professor Benito Bisso Schmidt  (Universidade Federal Rio Grande do Sul) and Yuri Fraccaroli (University of California Santa Barbara), with University of Leeds’s own Professor Kate Dossett to discuss the ways in which gender, race, and sexuality can be found within archives and how community archive and public history work can allow new ways in to these histories. 

Benito Bisso Schmidt is a professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Porto Alegre / Brazil). He was president of the National History Association – ANPUH-Brazil between 2011 and 2013. He currently coordinates Close – Reference Center for LGBTQIA + History in Rio Grande do Sul. He was a visiting professor at universities in France, the United States and Uruguay. His current research themes are: LGBTQIA+ memorial sites and emotions (especially loneliness) in letters sent to the Brazilian LGBTQIA+ movement in the 1990s. 

Yuri Fraccaroli (they/them) is a PhD Student at the Feminist Studies Department, University of California, Santa Barbara, currently working as a Teaching Assistant within the department. Currently, they are one of the 2024/25 ACLS/Mellon Dissertation Innovation Fellows with the project Archivo vivo! An Ethnography of the Archive: Latin American Sex and Gender Community Archives. Their research interests are situated in the following areas: Gender and Sexuality studies, Queer/Trans of Color Critique, Latin American Studies, Critical Race Theory and Black Studies. In addition to their academic roles, Yuri is an active member of Acervo Bajubá, an LGBT+ community archive in São Paulo. Within this vibrant community, they function as an educator, artist, and researcher, harnessing various modes of expression and inquiry to advance the archive's mission. Yuri's artistic endeavors include charcoal drawing, and they actively explore alternative research methodologies involving the arts and creative writing. They have published in peer-reviewed journals like  Gender and Development, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Revista Brasileira de Estudos da Homocultura, Revista Uruguaya de Ciencia Política, Psicologia Política, and book chapters in anthologies like História do Movimento LGBT no Brasil. 

Kate Dossett is an award-winning historian of the twentieth century United States with broad interests in cultural and political history and specializations in African American History,  Gender histories and histories of the African Diaspora. She has been teaching and researching African American cultural history for twenty years and has published widely on Black Theatre, the Harlem Renaissance, Black Feminism and the history of the archive. She is currently Professor of American History at the University of Leeds. Kate works with theatre practitioners and educators in Britain and the United States to recover and stage the historical work of Black theatre makers. She has collaborated with the National Theatre, Leeds Playhouse, British Library and The National Archives to find new ways to engage archives and to address the silencing and censorship of Black artistic work.