Laura Westengard

Laura Westengard (she or they) is an Associate Professor of English at the City University of New York. Her book, Gothic Queer Culture: Marginalized Communities and the Ghosts of Insidious Trauma, shows how queer culture adopts gothicism to challenge heteronormative and racialized systems and practices and to acknowledge the effects of microaggression and insidious trauma on queer communities. She is also co-editor of The 25 Sitcoms that Changed Television: Turning Points in American Culture, a collection that explores American culture after 1945 through the analysis of television sitcoms and their cultural resonances. She writes about popular culture, performance art, and contemporary U.S. literature and recently published an illustrated essay on Cold War-era lesbian pulp fiction for Morbid Anatomy. She is currently researching medical archives for an upcoming book on lesser known 19th and early 20th century medical devices that have shaped contemporary understandings of gender and sexuality.

Upcoming Lectures

Previous Lectures

Monster, Vampire, Cannibal: Queer Horror and the Gothic (NYC online) Thu. Oct. 15, 2020 - 7:00 pm EDT - 8:15 pm EDT