Leah DeVun, "The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance" (Columbia UP, 2021)

Summary

Leah DeVun is an Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University. Leah DeVun focuses on the history of gender, sexuality, science, and medicine in pre-modern Europe and on contemporary queer and transgender studies. Her first book Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time won the 2013 John Nicholas Brown Prize for an outstanding first book on medieval history. She has published articles in the GLQ, WSQ, Journal of the History of Ideas, among others, and co-edited Trans Historicities, a special issue of the Transgender Studies Quarterly in 2018. Leah is also an artist and curator whose work explores queer, feminist, and gender nonconforming history. Her work has appeared in the ONE Archives Gallery, the Leslie-Lohman Museum, and the Houston Center for Photography, among other venues. This episode discusses Leah’s second book The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance published in 2021 by Columbia University Press and which sold out of its first printing.

Leo Valdes is a Ph.D. student in the History department at Rutgers University. They study 20th century Black American and Latinx history centering trans and gender variant people’s politics and resistance.

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Daniela Valdes

Daniela Valdes is a graduate student in the History Department at Rutgers University.

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