FQT Podcast

In this episode, FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Vilashini Coopan, Professor of Literature and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and Alex Brostoff, Assistant Professor of English and Women's and Gender Studies at Georgetown University, about their co-edited anthology, Autotheories (MIT Press, 2025).  Professors Coopan and Brostoff discus...

In this episode FQT Center associate director Che Gossett speaks with professor Homi Bhabha.  Bhabha is the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. They discuss professor Bhabha's intellectual iterinary and how distinct sites such as Bombay and Oxford have shaped his cosmpolitan thought.  They also discuss his pathbreaking scholarship including such texts as Nation an...

In this episode, FQT director Che Gossett speaks with Charles Gaines about his artistic practice, his interest in systems thinking and unthinking, and how Gaines takes up questions about seriality and discreteness, difference and repetition in relation to race, materiality and infrastructure.  They discuss Gaines's pathbreaking 1993 exhibition with Catherine Lord at the Fine Arts Gallery of the Un...

In this episode, FQT podcast host Che speaks with their sister, the artist, filmmaker, writer, and activist, Tourmaline. Tourmaline's practice highlights the experiences of Black, queer, and trans communities and their capacity to impact the world. Her films and photographs rewrite mainstream narratives and cultural histories to initiate a paradigm shift and imagine a more pleasure-filled future....

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett continues their conversation with Professor Susan Stryker about the 1966 Compton's cafeteria uprising and its afterlives, and the history and future of trans studies.   Professor Stryker's forthcoming book  Changing Gender (FSG, 2026) will be published in August.  Stryker takes an autotheoretical approach in the text, as well as offering a pathbre...

In this episode, FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with author, film producer and director, actor and model, Geena Rocero about Horse Barbie: A Memoir of Reclamation (Random House, 2003), her modeling, directing and acting careers, her public advocacy work, trans diaspora, spirituality, and her new short film Dolls .  Music cred: "QC Gurlz" by Stef Aranas

In this (first of two parts) episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Professor Susan Stryker. Stryker is Professor Emerita of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Arizona, as well as Distinguished Visitor and 2025-2026 Faculty Research Fellow at Stanford University's Clayman Institute for Gender Research.  Stryker has served as Visiting Professor of Gender, Women's, and S...

In this episode, FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with psychoanalyst and scholar Avgi Saketopoulou, who is the 2025-26 Avenali Chair in the Humanities at UC Berkeley, about her book  Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (NYU Press, 2023), and the entanglements of race, gender, sexuality and psychoanalysis.   Music Credit: "Consideration" by Rihanna and SZA

In this episode FQT associate director speaks with Harvard Law professor Michael J. Klarman about his award winning scholarship in civil rights and legal history, including From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality (Oxford University Press, 2004) which received the 2005 Bancroft Prize in History, and his newest book, The Framer's Coup: the making of the...

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Professor David Joselit.  Joselit is  Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Art, Film, and Visual Studies and Chair for Art, Film, and Visual Studies (AFVS) at Harvard University.  Joselit began his career as a curator at The ICA in Boston from 1983-1989. After receiving his PhD from Harvard in 1995, he has also taught at the University...

In this episode FQT associate director and podcast host Che Gossett speaks with critic, essayist, curator, and professor Nora Khan.  Nora Khan recently served as the Arts Council Professor at UCLA in Design Media Arts. Her writing on philosophy of artificial intelligence and emergent technologies is referenced heavily across disciplinary formations in the humanities and the arts. Her books include...

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Kellie Jones, Professor in Art History and Archaeology and the Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS) at Columbia University.  Professor Jones is a 2016 MacArthur Foundation Fellow, and the recipient of numerous awards for her scholarship and curation.  Professor Jones is the author of EyeMinded: Living and Writing...

In this episode, FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Huey Copeland, Andrew W. Mellon Chair and Professor of Modern Art and Black Study at the University of Pittsburgh, about his work in art history, criticism, and Black diasporic and contemporary art.  Professor Copeland is the author of the critically acclaimed book Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultu...

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with poet and professor Tracy K. Smith.  Smith served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States, and her book of poetry Life on Mars (Greywolf Press, 2011) received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize.  Smith is Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute as well as professor of English and of African and African A...

This 2022 podcast episode is a conversation between Maria Murphy (then associate director of the FQT Center) and Lane Timothy Speidel, Philadelphia artist, musician, writer, and Gender Jawn's podcast producer.  In their new exhibition at Vox Populi Gallery, ALL EXITS, Lane Speidel lets us into the backstage of the mind. Sculptures and paintings create a night that is a frozen dream where we can al...

In this episode Che Gossett, associate director of the Center for Research in Feminist, Queer and Transgender Studies at the University of Pennsylvania speaks with the authors of Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction (Northwestern UP, 2024) professors Steven Swarbrick of CUNY and Jean Thomas Tremblay of York University.  They discuss the concept of negative life, the contemporary politics of eco...

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Jina B. Kim, who is assistant professor of English Language & Literature and of the Study of Women & Gender at Smith College, about her forthcoming book, Care at the End of the World: Dreaming of Infrastructure: Crip-of-Color Writing after the U.S. Welfare State  (Duke UP, March 2025).  Professor Kim speaks about her articulation of a...

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with literary theory, philosophy, and subaltern studies scholar Professor Gayatri Spivak, who is University Professor in the department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, the 2012 recipient of the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy, and the author of numerous field shaping books and articles, including  A Critique...

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Roderick Ferguson, professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and American Studies at Yale University. Ferguson was the 2018-2019 president of the American Studies Association.  He is the author of  One-Dimensional Queer  (Polity, 2019),   We Demand: The University and Student Protests   (University of California, 2017),  The...

In this episode, recorded during fall semester 2023, FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Calvin Warren, associate professor of African American Studies at Emory University about his book Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism and Emancipation (Duke UP, 2018), and his thoughts on Black nihilism and spirituality.    Music credits: "There Are Other Worlds (Have They Not Told You Of) by Su...

In this conversation FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with poet, author and professor Jackie Wang.  Wang is an assistant professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California and the author of  Carceral Capitalism (Semiotext(e), 2018), and Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun (Semiotext(e), 2023), as well as works of poetry, such as The Sunflower Cast A Spell T...

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett interviews novelist Torrey Peters about her intellectual and writerly formation, her early online novella publications,  T he Masker and Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones , and her novel Detransition Baby  (One World, 2021) which received the the 2021 PEN/Hemingway award for debut fiction, and was also named a Best Book of the Century by the New...

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Paul Gilroy, who is Professor of the Humanities and Founding Director of the  Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism & Racialisation at University College London. Professor Gilroy's scholarship has been globally influential, especially his books There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack (1987), The Black Atlantic: Modernity an...

In this episode, FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Amy Tobin, University of Cambridge Associate Professor in the History of Art and Curator of Contemporary Programmes, at Kettle's Yard, about feminist art history, feminist art curation, coalitional politics and her book, Women Artists Together Art in the Age of Women's Liberation (Yale UP, 2023), as well as her 2014 article, co-author...

In this episode, FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Austin Svedjan, doctoral student and Hamilton-Law Graduate Fellow in the Department of English at Penn, and John Paul Ricco, professor of Art History at the University of Toronto, about their co-edited special issue of the journal Postmodern Culture , which is freely available online . Song credit: "If You Can't Help Me" by Brontez Pu...