We are pleased to announce that the registration form and program for "Queer Places, Practices, and Lives: A Symposium in Honor of Sam Steward" are available on the symposium website. This two-day conference, to be held May 18-19, at Ohio State features an exciting and diverse array of panels composed of scholars, activists, and students from throughout the U.S. and internationally; lunchtime discussions; plenary panels featuring some of the most prominent scholars in the field; and a keynote by Justin Spring, biographer of Sam Steward, an alumnus of the Ohio State English Department (B.A., M.A., Ph.D., 1927-34). The conference is open to the OSU community as well as the general public, and we hope that you will want to take full advantage of the offerings.
Thanks to our generous co-sponsors, there is no registration fee. However, we are asking that you still fill out and submit the online registration form so that we can get a rough head count for the various special events and an estimate for how many programs to print.
Please register as soon as possible, but no later than April 15.
Feel free to direct questions to Debra Moddelmog (moddelmog.1@osu.edu) or Joe Ponce (ponce.8@osu.edu).
It is fitting that the first, full-scale, academic queer studies conference at OSU should be made possible by, and in commemoration of, one of the university’s former graduates. Born in 1909 in the small town of Woodsfield, Ohio, Samuel Steward enrolled at Ohio State University in 1927 and earned a BA in 1931 and a PhD in 1934, both in English literature. Steward went on to teach literature at OSU and other colleges for several years, eventually abandoned academia and became a well-respected tattoo artist under the name Phil Sparrow, and later on wrote a number of erotic novels, using the pseudonym Phil Andros, as well as other books.
In 1995, the estate of Samuel Steward, at his bequest, donated funds to the Department of English at OSU, which were meant to further research on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and queer lives and issues. These funds have only recently resurfaced and are now being put to their intended use. In keeping with Steward’s proclivity for traversing the academic and the popular, this conference seeks to create spaces where scholars, students, community members, artists, and performers can interact and converse with each other.
