This paper, taken from the third chapter of Aisha Djelid's forthcoming monograph, _Forced Reproduction: Slavery, Gender, and Family in the Antebellum South_ under contract with the University of Georgia Press, explores antebellum enslavers’ “regimentation” of the health of enslaved people, particularly women and girls, to establish a proto-eugenic and pronatalist ideology to reproduce the slave regime.

This workshop will consider the ways that queer history, art, and curating intersect. Each speaker will give a brief presentation on the ways that they conceptualize curating in their own practice, whether as an artist, curator, professor, and/or author. A brief conversation among the panelists will follow and then open up to the entire audience.

A bit more about individual panelists:

*Gemma Rolls-Bentley* (author and curator): https://www.gemmarollsbentley.com

*Leah DeVun* (photographer, author, and historian): https://www.leahdevun.com

Reading: Mijke van der Drift and Nat Raha, “They Would Plant the Rose Garden Themselves”: Femme, Complicity, Solidarity, and the Rewiring of the Sensuous’. _Social Text_ 42, no. 3 (2024): 75-100

What is “care” good for, and how best to apprehend it as a scholarly category? The “Care” Series gathers scholars of any discipline who are interested in reading and thinking about “care” together. Each session, we gather to discuss a short reading with the help of a local expert.

Oxford Shakespearianist Emma Smith will be in conversation with writer Will Tosh, author most recently of the publicly acclaimed _Straight Acting: The Many Queer Lives of William Shakespeare_. Will Tosh is the interim director of higher education and research at the Globe Theatre, a contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, and holds degrees from Oxford and Queen Mary, University of London.

Reading: Trudie Knijn and Monique Kremer, ‘Gender and the Caring Dimension of Welfare States: Toward Inclusive Citizenship’. _Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society_ 4, no. 3 (1997): 328–361

What is “care” good for, and how best to apprehend it as a scholarly category? The “Care” Series gathers scholars of any discipline who are interested in reading and thinking about “care” together. Each session, we gather to discuss a short reading with the help of a local expert.

In this presentation, Charlotte Schallié discusses _But I Live: Three Stories of Child Survivors of the Holocaust_ as a case study for pursuing a relational approach to testimony gathering processes with Holocaust survivors.

*Justin Bengry* designed and led the world’s only MA in Queer History at Goldsmiths, University of London, from 2017 until 2024. Even as his appointment as the UK’s first lecturer in queer history signaled an important moment in the development of queer history in the UK, the field remains fraught with challenges from within and beyond the academy. Queer historians face attacks on specialisation from their own institutions, while on social media we are caricatured and condemned. But it is precisely for these reasons that an inclusive and critical queer history is more urgent than ever.

Reading: Premilla Nadasen, ‘Rethinking Care Work: (Dis)affection and the Politics of Caring’. _Feminist Formations_ 33, no. 1 (2021): 165-188

What is “care” good for, and how best to apprehend it as a scholarly category? The “Care” Series gathers scholars of any discipline who are interested in reading and thinking about “care” together. Each session, we gather to discuss a short reading with the help of a local expert.

Historians of nineteenth-century women and material culture have explored the myriad ways that material practices informed female strategies of identity, agency and creativity. This paper relates these ideas to experiences had in the nineteenth-century asylum. Focusing on the experiences of women, it examines the diary and material legacy of one asylum patient in particular: Elizabeth Hitchcock, a staymaker confined at Lancaster asylum in the 1840s.