From Sydney to New York: Contemporary Global Queer Issues

DATE
Tuesday, September 26, 2023

TIME
5:00 p.m.

LOCATION
In-person or online stream
New York Law School
Auditorium Level
185 West Broadway, New York, NY 10013

Register today.

SPONSORS
NYLS Outlaws
Wilf Impact Center for Public Interest Law’s Racial Justice Project

Join the Racial Justice Project and Outlaws for a conversation between academic, author, and gay rights activist Dennis Altman and journalist, author, translator, and activist Masha Gessen. This event will be moderated by Bennett Capers, Stanley D. and Nikki Waxberg Professor of Law at Fordham Law School and Director of the Center on Race, Law, and Justice, and will be followed by an informal reception.

(Moderator) Bennett Capers, Stanley D. and Nikki Waxberg Professor of Law at Fordham Law School; Director of the Center on Race, Law, and Justice 

Dennis Altman, Professorial Fellow in the Institute for Human Security at La Trobe University 

Masha Gessen, Staff Writer, The New Yorker

SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES

Dennis Altman is an Australian academic, author, and gay rights activist. His academic career began with a Fulbright Scholarship to Cornell University, where he began working with American gay activists in the 1970s. He returned to Australia, where he taught politics at the University of Sydney and later moved to La Trobe University in Melbourne, where he became a professor of politics. He was appointed the Visiting Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University in January 2005. Altman is a Professorial Fellow in the Institute for Human Security at La Trobe University. He was president of the AIDS Society of Asia and the Pacific and has been a member of the governing council of the International AIDS Society. In July 2006, he was listed by The Bulletin as one of the 100 most influential Australians ever. In June 2008, he was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia. Since his first book, Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation, he has written 15 books, including Global Sex, Queer Wars (with Jonathan Symons), Unrequited Love: Diary of an Accidental Activist and, most recently, a murder story: Death in the Sauna.

Bennett Capers is the Stanley D. and Nikki Waxberg Professor of Law at Fordham Law School and is also the Director of the Center on Race, Law, and Justice. His academic interests include the relationship between race, gender, technology, and criminal justice, and he is a prolific writer on these topics. His articles and essays have been published in the California Law Review, Columbia Law Review, Cornell Law Review, Harvard Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Minnesota Law Review, New York University Law Review, and UCLA Law Review, among others.   In addition to co-editing Critical Race Judgments: Rewritten U.S. Court Opinions on Race and Law (with Devon Carbado, Robin Lenhardt, and Angela Onwuachi-Willig), Feminist Judgments: Rewritten Criminal Law Opinions (with Corey Rayburn Yung and Sarah Deer), and Criminal Law: A Critical Approach (with Roger Fairfax and Eric Miller), he also has a forthcoming book about prosecutors, The Prosecutor’s Turn. His commentary and op-eds have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other media. Prior to teaching, Professor Capers spent nearly ten years as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York. His work trying several federal racketeering cases earned him a nomination for the Department of Justice’s Director’s Award in 2004.

Masha Gessen is a Russian-American journalist, author, translator, and activist who has been an outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. Gessen is nonbinary and trans and uses they/them pronouns. Gessen has written extensively on LGBTQ rights. Described as “Russia’s leading LGBT rights activist,” they have said that for many years they were “probably the only publicly out gay person in the whole country.” They now live in New York with their wife and children. Gessen writes primarily in English but also in their native Russian. In addition to being the author of several non-fiction books, they have been a prolific contributor to such publications as The New York Times, the New York Review of Books, The Washington Post,  The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, New Statesman, Granta, Slate, Vanity Fair, Harper’s Magazine, The New Yorker, and U.S. News & World Report. Since 2017, they have been a staff writer for The New Yorker. Gessen has written 14 books, including the most recent, Surviving Autocracy.