How to Do Gay and Lesbian History

Catalog description

Taught between the History Dept and the Hay Library, this will uncover queer pasts through engagement with collections held at Brown and visits from experts in the collections and in queer histories. We will ask: how do historians do their work in the field of Gay and Lesbian History? What are their habits, what are their limits, and from which fields do they draw insight? How do they imagine who their research subjects were, especially given that "gay and lesbian" are modern terms? How do curators decide what to include in collections, and go about finding, collecting, and processing those materials? Students can expect to get hands-on practice in the collections at the Hay and will produce a piece of original research as a final project.