Sexuality & STEM in the past & present: an LGBTQ+ history month event

This event takes place during LGBTQ+ History Month 2022. It is an opportunity to think about and discuss relations between queerness and Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), both past and present. Three expert panellists will speak to the topic from their own perspective, followed by an audience question and discussion period.

 The sciences and medicine have played, and continue to play, a fundamental role determining how LGBTQ+ people are understood, interpreted, and the extent to which they are able to live lives free of oppression and bigotry. Meanwhile international efforts to increase the representation of LGBTQ+ people within STEM have not yet produced radical change, with large disparities continuing to exist between different fields. Our panel provides a setting in which these themes, amongst many others, can become open to discussion.

This event has been organised on behalf of the University of Birmingham’s Rainbow Network, which represents the university's LGBTQ+ staff, and the Transformational HPS network, an international network for historians and philosophers of science who are queering, decolonising, and centring disability in their analyses of STEM. It is partnered with the University of Birmingham’s oSTEM society - (Out in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) - which supports LGBTQ+ students studying, or with an interest in, STEM subjects.

Organisers: Dr Dominic Berry, Dr Alex Hall, and Dr Vanessa Heggie.

The panel consists of:

Dr Ross Brooks (he/him) - Ross (@rossb_oxford) is a historian who researches queer aspects of the history of biology and eugenics. He has published several articles on the subject in leading academic journals, including Archives of Natural History, the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, and the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society. In June 2019 he acted as contributing editor forthe first queer-themed edition of Viewpoint, the magazine of the British Society for the History of Science.

Dr Tyler Kelly (they/he) - Tyler is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow and Reader in Geometry at the University of Birmingham. They currently serve on the LGBTQ+ STEM Project’s Steering Committee and the London Mathematical Society’s Women and Diversity in Mathematics Committee. They have navigated higher education from undergraduate on as an openly queer mathematician.

Dr Kate Davison (she/her) - Kate is DAAD Lecturer in Queer History at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she teaches Queer Public History. Her primary research focuses on histories of sexology and psychiatry in the twentieth century, with special attention to ‘reorientation’ practices. She has previously worked in museums, conducting a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Material Culture Survey report for Museums Victoria (Australia), and was Program Director for the 2019 LGBTIQ+ Archives, Libraries, Museums and Special Collections conference ‘Queering Memory’ in Berlin, Germany.