Jennifer Brier is a professor of gender, women's studies, and history at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she also directs the program in gender and women's studies. She specializes in U.S. history of sexuality and gender, the history of HIV/AIDS, and public history. She is the author of Infectious Ideas: U.S. Political Response to the AIDS Crisis (2009). She guest-edited and contributed to "HIV/AIDS in U.S. History: Interchange," in the Journal of American History (September 2017), the first feature-length piece on the subject to appear in the journal. She also coedited, with Jim Downs and Jennifer Morgan, Connexions: Histories of Race and Sex in North America (2016). With Jill Austin, Brier cocurated Out in Chicago, the Chicago History Museum's award-winning exhibition on local LGBT history; coedited the companion anthology; and wrote the introductory essay entitled "Out in Chicago: Exhibiting LGBT History at the Crossroads."
This talk centers the oral histories of dozens of women living with HIV/AIDS in the contemporary United States. It details how women living with HIV have moved from the margins of what was once a deadly epidemic to becoming survivors, storytellers and history makers. Their stories and histories of survival can inform our sense of US women's history, the history of racial formation, and the history of health and wellbeing in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.