Yale University professor Roderick A. Ferguson will deliver the Humanities Council’s Fall 2026 Gauss Seminars in Criticism on October 7-8. His two-day visit to Princeton, under the general title “On Destruction and Survival,” will include two public lectures.
Ferguson’s visit begins with “The Bookshop of Black Queer Diaspora: On Terror and the Difficult Miracle of Critical Intellection” on Wednesday, October 7 and concludes with “The Bookshop of Black Queer Diaspora: Aurality against Fascism” on Thursday, October 8. Both lectures will be held in Betts Auditorium beginning at 5:00 pm.
In the lecture series, Ferguson will examine black queer art and activism through the lens of an experimental and conceptual text, The Bookshop of Black Queer Diaspora. With a fictional bookshop and art gallery as its framework, the text uses actual artifacts to explore black queer histories and their responses to the ongoing legacies of colonialism and slavery and their presence within neoliberal and fascist formations.
Ferguson is the William Robertson Coe Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and American Studies at Yale. He is also faculty in the Yale Prison Education Initiative as well as the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute/Yale National Initiative. He is the author of several books, including One-Dimensional Queer and We Demand: The University and Student Protests. He is the 2020 recipient of the Kessler Award from the Center for LGBTQ Studies. His book In View of the Tradition: Black Art and Radical Thought will be released Fall 2026.
Instituted in 1949 in honor of Dean Christian Gauss, the Gauss Seminars in Criticism provide a forum for discussion, study, and the exchange of ideas in the humanities.
Learn more about the Gauss Seminars in Criticism on the Humanities Council website.
