Scholar - Women Also Know History

Participant Info

Keywords: public history, oral history, women and HIV, history of HIV/AIDS, LGBT history

About Me: Jennifer Brier directs the Program in Gender and Women’s Studies at UIC, where she is also Professor of GWS and History. She specializes in US gay and lesbian history, the history of sexuality and gender, and public history. Brier is the author of Infectious Ideas: U.S. Political Response to the AIDS Crisis, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2009, and reissued in paperback in 2011.

Brier curated, with Jill Austin, Out in Chicago, the Chicago History Museum’s award winning exhibition on LGBT history in Chicago that ran from May 2011 to March 2012. She and Austin also co-edited an anthology that accompanied the exhibition and wrote the introductory essay entitled, “Out in Chicago: Exhibiting LGBT History at the Crossroads.” They have published several other articles on queer public history.

Brier is at work on a major public history project called History Moves, a community-curated mobile gallery that will provide a space for Chicago-based community organizers and activists to share their histories with a wide audience. Since 2015, History Moves has partnered with the Women’s Interagency HIV Study (WIHS) to collect and curate the stories of almost forty women living with HIV/AIDS. I’m Still Surviving, is multimedia project that presents the women’s history to a wide audience. The exhibition focused on Chicago, “In Plain Sight” was displayed in five Chicago neighborhoods.

Recent Publications: “AIDS and Action,” The Routledge History of Queer America, Don Romesburg ed.. Routledge, 2018: 95-106.

“I’m Still Surviving: Oral Histories of Women Living with HIV/AIDS in Chicago,” accepted essay for Oral History ReviewSpecial Issue onDecentering and Decolonizing Feminist Oral History, Katrina Srigley and Stacey Zembrzycki eds. (volume 45, no. 1, Winter/Spring 2018): 68-83.

“HIV/AIDS in US History: Interchange,” Journal of American History, volume 104, no. 2, (September 2017): 431–460; guest editor and contributor.

“History Moves: Mobilizing Public Histories in Post-Digital Space,” co-authored with Matt Wizinsky, Scholarly and Research Communication, volume 7, no. 2 (2016): 13pp.

“Reagan and AIDS,” in A Companion to Ronald Reagan, Andrew Jones ed., Wiley/Blackwell, 2015: 221-237.

“Displaying Queer History at the Chicago History Museum: Lessons from the Curators of Out in Chicago,” co-authored with Jill Austin, in Interpreting LGBT History at Museums and Historic Sites, Susan Ferentinos ed., Rowman & Littlefield, 2015: 119-130.

“How to Teach AIDS in the U.S. History Survey,” in Understanding and Teaching Lesbian, Gay Bisexual and Transgender History, Leila Rupp and Susan Freeman eds., University of Wisconsin Press, 2014: 279-288.

Media Coverage: http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/March-2018/The-Invention-of-a-Man/; http://bit.ly/2DCMwGw