Greetings and welcome to the 2014-15 academic year! As SPAN enters its fifth year of operation, we want to take this opportunity to introduce some new arrivals to our campus, remind everyone of opportunities that the project offers, and provide a heads-up concerning events planned for the coming months.

One of the most significant aspects of SPAN’s efforts is our postdoctoral fellowship competition. We are delighted to welcome two new postdocs to Northwestern this year, both of whom will begin two-year appointments:

• Kai M. Green recently completed his dissertation on black queer Los Angeles at the University of Southern California. At Northwestern, he is jointly appointed in African American Studies and the Gender & Sexuality Studies Program, and he will be teaching classes on “Queer in the City” and “Gender, Sexuality, and Race: Black Queer Looks.”
• Aaron Norton’s dissertation, recently completed at the University of California at Davis, traced the science, ethics and politics of male circumcision’s emergence as an HIV-risk category and prevention strategy. Aaron is jointly appointed in Sociology and the Gender & Sexuality Studies Program, and he will be teaching classes on “Sexuality, the Social Sciences, and LGBT Rights” and “Sexuality and HIV/AIDS.”

Kai and Aaron were among 93 applicants for these positions, and we anticipate that they will make substantial contributions to our intellectual community here at Northwestern. For more information about them, please see here.

This year SPAN will continue to provide a range of funding opportunities for faculty and graduate students. We encourage everyone to familiarize themselves with these opportunities at our website, which, through the efforts of our program assistant, Jeremy Cornelius, has become a complete and useful guide to what SPAN has to offer. As in previous years, we will also sponsor a number of events and activities, including a reading group in the winter quarter and a workshop in April. More immediately, we will be hosting several talks this fall, including ones by Kai and Aaron. Please stay posted for details!

We look forward to seeing you all at events this year, and we always appreciate your feedback and suggestions.

Héctor Carrillo and Steve Epstein
Co-Directors, the Sexualities Project at Northwestern (SPAN)

SPAN 2012-13 Dissertation Fellow Kareem Khubchandani has been awarded a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Embry Foundation Center for Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Kareem’s dissertation is entitled “Ishtyle: Queer Nightlife Performance in India and the South Asian Diaspora.”

We are delighted to announce that Elizabeth Rodriguez, Ph.D. candidate in English and SPAN dissertation fellow in 2013-14, has been awarded a Woodrow Wilson Women’s Studies Dissertation Fellowship for 2014. Elizabeth is one of only 10 recipients of this prestigious national fellowship, which “supports the final year of dissertation writing for Ph.D. candidates in the humanities and social sciences whose work addresses topics of women and gender in interdisciplinary and original ways.” Elizabeth’s dissertation is on “Consensual Relations: Sexual and Political Subjectivity in England, 1550-1700.”

Elizabeth has additionally been awarded a 2014 Presidential Fellowship, the most prestigious fellowship awarded to graduate students at Northwestern. Her dissertation research, funded by SPAN in 2012-13, is entitled “Consensual Relations: Sexual and Political Subjectivity in England, 1550-1700.”