Monica P. Moore Speaker Series | Cameron Awkward Rich: Looking for Pauli, Pauli Murray’s Trans Poetics

The 2023-2024 Monica Moore Speaker Series Lecture will be given by Cameron Awkward-Rich, Associate Professor in Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He will be presenting on Pauli Murray’s Trans Poetics. Westley Montgomery (TAPS) and Jenny Adrine Madsen Evang (MTL) will be responding.  

Please join us for this talk on November 9, in the Terrace Room (Building 460, 4th Floor) at 4pm. There will be a reception following the lecture with drinks and food. RSVPs are not required but are encouraged. Please RSVP using this form by November 2nd. 

Pauli Murray was a twentieth-century black writer, priest, and legal thinker who has been, for the last two decades or so, the subject of a recovery project. As a result, Murray is now regarded as a crucial player in the history of civil rights litigation; in U.S. feminist organizing and theology; and in black feminist critique in relation to the above. Further, the recovery of Murray’s contributions has coincided with the narration of Murray as someone who was (or might have been, in another time) trans. Following the lead of Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston (1989) this talk — part academic, part poetry— considers Pauli Murray as an enduring figure in and for a black trans literary past.

Cameron Awkward-Rich (MTL PhD ’17) is the author of two collections of poetry—Sympathetic Little Monster (2016) and Dispatch (2019)—as well as The Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment (Duke University Press, 2022). His writing has been supported, in various forms, by fellowships from Cave Canem, Duke University, the Lannan Foundation, and the ACLS. Presently, he is an associate professor in Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst,

Respondents:

Jenny Andrine Madsen Evang is a PhD Candidate in the Modern Thought and Literature Department at Stanford University, where she is also pursuing PhD minors in Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Comparative Studies of Race and Ethnicity. She is a scholar of media(tization), identity, and temporality, and her work focuses on contemporary representations of gender, sexuality, and race in Nordic culture. Her current work explores the interplay between the rhetoric of gender equality, multiculturalism, and Nordic homonationalism by engaging works across the mediums of television, social media, apps, LARP, and experimental cinema. Her work has been published in Journal of Scandinavian Cinema, lambda nordica, South Atlantic Review, and Transgender Studies Quarterly. 

Westley Montgomery is a PhD candidate in Performance Studies at Stanford University and holds Bachelor's and Master’s degrees in Music from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. 

Westley’s scholarly and teaching interests include Performance Studies; Feminist, Gender, and Trans Studies; Black Studies; Sound Studies; Critical Musicology; and Technology and Society Studies. Current research interests include opera pedagogies, performance practices, and cultures; technologies of sound recording, amplification, and augmentation; gender and the uses of the voice in HyperPop; and TikTok and algorithmic performance platforms.  Westley is also a vocalist and multidisciplinary artist and has produced, curated, dramaturged, and directed several new works and productions.

This event is made possible by support from our cosponsors and collaborators, The Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and The Program in Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies. 

The Monica Moore Speaker Series is named after the administrator and soul of the interdisciplinary graduate program of Modern Thought and Literature for forty years. It is the only endowed lecture at Stanford that honors a staff member