In a hybrid (in-person and live-streamed) Chats in the Stacks talk about the book she co-edited, Trans Historical: Gender Plurality before the Modern (Cornell University Press, 2021), Masha Raskolnikov presents proof against those who claim that transgender people, experiences, and identities could not have existed prior to the twentieth century.

The collection of essays explores the abundance and diversity of gender experiences that flourished in the medieval and early modern worlds—from colonial North America to Renaissance Poland; from Byzantine and Ottoman Greece and Turkey to Korea. Alongside historical questions about the meaning of sexual differentiation, this multi-disciplinary volume offers a series of diverse meditations on how scholars of the medieval and early-modern periods might approach gender nonconformity before the nineteenth-century emergence of the norm and the normal.

Raskolnikov is an associate professor in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell, and she is also its director of undergraduate studies. She is the author of Body Against Soul: Gender and Sowlehele in Middle English Allegory. 

This book talk is sponsored by Olin Library. Light refreshments will be served. Online viewers: Register via Zoom link prior to the event.