D.C. Queer Studies
Each year the department hosts a lecture or symposium to stimulate important conversations among the LGBTQ studies community in greater Washington, D.C.
In conjunction with the official start of the LGBTQ Studies Program at the University of Maryland in 2003 it began hosting an LGBT Studies Speaker Series. In 2006 a group of faculty from schools in the Consortium of Universities of the Washington Metropolitan Area formed to discuss new works in the field and to exchange, support, and cultivate new ways of engaging with LGBT/Queer/Sexuality Studies across the disciplines and across institutions. That group, the DC Queer Studies Consortium, was integral to the inception of the first DC Queer Studies Symposium in 2008. Although the original DC Queer Studies Consortium has since dissolved, the Harriet Tubman Department of Women Gender, and Sexuality Studies has taken on the organization of an annual lecture or symposium also referred to as DC Queer Studies or sometimes DCQS.
April 9-11, 2026 Refuse/Remove/Remember: The Archive Beyond
The 2026 DC Queer Studies Symposium is a three-day event entitled Refuse/Remove/Remember: Archiving Beyond. The symposium brings together scholars, artists, archivists, and community members to examine archives as sites of struggle, relation, erasure, and survival. Grounded in Indigenous, decolonizing, and queer engagements with archives, the event also draws on critical archival studies to ask how histories are preserved, contested, withheld, and remade across institutional and community contexts. We anticipate participation from archivists, librarians, artists, and scholars working across community archiving, digital sovereignty, zine cultures, and experimental archival practices.
The first day of the symposium will be held in person and will center hands-on workshops and performances. Programming will include floppy disk art, performances, a visit and interactive session with the DC Punk Archive featuring materials from their zine collections, and a postcard-writing workshop inspired by “postcards from the dead,” inviting participants to engage archival practice as a form of relational communication across time.
The second day will be fully virtual and will feature talks by Indigenous and queer librarians, archivists, and scholars reflecting on their work building, using, and transforming archives. A watch party option will be available for those who wish to gather in person and engage the virtual programming collectively.
The third day will take place in partnership with LACS and will center community gathering through a DJ dance party, extending the symposium’s focus on archives into embodied, collective forms of memory, expression, and presence.
View a slideshow of posters from previous events:
