Saturday 6 December 2025, 4pm - 5pm
Seminar Room 11 (Intersectional Humanities Room), St. Anne's College, Oxford OX2 6HS
All welcome. No RSVP required.
The Trans Studies Working Group will convene its inaugural Critical Trans Thought panel on Black trans study and trans of color critique. Che Gossett (University of Pennsylvania), Avik Sarkar (Harvard Law School), and Victor Ultra Omni (Emory University) will join TSWG for a discussion on scholarly and grassroots work, disciplinary formation, and truth-telling in hostile contexts.
Speakers:
Che Gossett is a Black non-binary writer and critical theorist specializing in queer/trans studies, aesthetic theory, abolitionist thought and black study. Prior to joining the staff at Penn, Che served as the Racial Justice Postdoctoral Fellow at the Initiative for a Just Society, Columbia Law School, and was also a visiting fellow at Harvard Law School, in the Animal Law and Policy Program. Che received their doctorate in Women's and Gender Studies from Rutgers University, New Brunswick in May 2021. They received a BA in African American Studies from Morehouse College, an MAT in Social Studies from Brown University, an MA in History from the University of Pennsylvania, and were a 2019-2020 Helena Rubenstein Fellow in the Whitney Independent Study Program. Che received a Ruth Stephan Fellowship from Beinecke Library at Yale University for the summer of 2022, to research the papers of queer feminist filmmaker Barbara Hammer. Che has been a fellow at the Centre for Life Writing at Wolfson College, Oxford University, as well as the Centre for Visual Culture and Corpus Christi College at the University of Cambridge. Che is a 2024 Creative Capital Andy Warhol Writers Grant award recipient.
Avik Sarkar investigates the aesthetics, erotics, and politics of transsexual life. She is especially interested in trans legal theory, trans feminist thought, and trans of color critique. Avik has presented her work at Lancaster University, the Hunter Museum of American Art, the Center for the Study of Women at UCLA, and the Connecticut Ethnic Studies Symposium. She graduated from Yale magna cum laude with distinction in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies and a certificate of advanced language study in French. Her thesis was supported by the Bruce L. Cohen LGBT Studies Research Award. Avik is currently at work on an archival project published in spring 2025—supported by a research fellowship from the nonprofit arts organization Visual AIDS—about the late San Francisco-based artist Miss Kitty Litter. Last year she pursued a master’s at Oxford, fully funded by the Clarendon Scholarship, and in fall 2025 she began legal studies at Harvard.
Victor Ultra Omni (They/Them) is a PhD Candidate in the department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) at Emory University. Their dissertation The Love Ball: A History of New York City’s House-Structured Ballroom Culture, 1972-1992 provides a historical treatment of the origins of ballroom culture. They use methods of oral history, participatory action research, and broader memory work to engage the pioneers of New York City’s house-structured ballroom culture. Victor’s dissertation research includes excavating archives of Black and Latine queer and trans elders, gathering oral histories, and even throwing a ball to celebrate the 45th anniversary of their house, the worldwide pioneering house of Ultra Omni. Their writing is published or forthcoming in the Journal of Feminist Australian Studies, Trans Studies Quarterly (TSQ), the African American Intellectual Historical Society, The Black Scholar, and the textbook Feminist Studies: Foundations, Conversations, and Applications among other publications. All of their teaching, writing, and community work emerges from a grounded Black trans studies approach attuned to the politics of memory and guided by an ethic of embodied, intergenerational listening as both method and a guide for our movements.
Moderator:
Samir Ravi is a critical theorist, poet, and undergraduate student at Oxford. Her research interests include trans of color feminisms, aesthetics, and epistemologies. Samir has presented her research at Howard University and Harvard Divinity School. She is currently working on a study of futurity in trans poetry and performance.
TSWG mailing list: transstudiesworkinggroup-subscribe@maillist.ox.ac.uk.
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