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."
As we approach the fifth decade of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, we continue to have a pressing need for a useable and meaningful history of how people-across identity categories of sexuality, gender and race-struggled and fought to make minoritized communities healthy in the face of profound abandonment and opprobrium. In this talk historian Jennifer Brier will detail a series of powerful examples of resistance to this silencing in hopes of sparking a conversation about how to imagine a future without AIDS.
