James Robert Brudner ’83 Memorial Prize and Lectures 2015 - 2016

This year's recipient is Susan O. Stryker, Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies. as well as Director of the Institute for LGBT Studies, at University of Arizona (Tucson).  Stryker is an openly transgender woman and a celebrated author, editor, scholar and filmmaker. 

Yale University lecture and reception:  

Wednesday, October 14, lecture 4:30 PM, Reception 6 PM.

Lecture at Sudler Hall, floor 2A in WLH (100 Wall Street, New Haven, CT).  
Reception 6 PM at The Graduate Club, 155 Elm Street, New Haven, CT

Cost: FREE and open to the public

Susan Stryker is Director of the Institute for LGBT Studies and Associate Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Arizona. Her theoretical writings, historical scholarship, and media activism have helped shape the field of transgender studies over the past 25 years. She is an Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker (Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton's Cafeteria, 2005), and award-winning anthologist (The Transgender Studies Reader, Routledge, 2006, Lambda Literary Award; and The Transgender Studies Reader 2, Routledge 2013, Ruth Benedict Book Prize). She is the author of numerous articles that have been published in Radical History Review, GLQ, Parallax, Women's Studies Quarterly, and other journals, and several books, including Transgender History, and Queer Pulp. She is founding co-editor of the journal TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly

Stryker has a BA from the University of Oklahoma (1983), earned her Ph.D. in United States History from UC Berkeley (1992), and later held a postdoctoral fellowship in Sexuality Studies at Stanford University. She has been a distinguished visiting faculty member at Harvard University, University of California Santa Cruz, Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, and Macquarie University in Sydney. Before joining the faculty of the University of Arizona in 2011 to direct the Institute for LGBT Studies, Susan was Associate Professor of Gender Studies at Indiana University.

She is a multiple award-winning author, editor, and filmmaker whose credits include the Emmy-winning documentary Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton's Cafeteria (Frameline/ITVS 2005), the massive, two-volume Transgender Studies Reader (Routledge 2006), the introductory textbook Transgender History (Seal Press 2008), and popular nonfiction works such as Queer Pulp: Perverse Passions from the Golden Age of the Paperback and Gay by the Bay: A History of Queer Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area. Susan also worked for several years as the Executive Director of the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco. 

She currently teaches classes on LGBT history, and on embodiment and technology. Research interests include transgender and queer studies, film and media, built environments, somatechnics, and critical theory. 

Recent interview with Susan Stryker: http://www.theawl.com/2015/05/the-academic-behind-the-medias-transgender-tipping-point

(Official Bio of Susan O. Stryker to be inserted here, when received)

About the Jim Brudner Yale '83 Memorial Prize 

The Jim Brudner Prize, established in 2000, is awarded annually to an accomplished scholar or activist whose work has made significant contributions to the understanding of LGBT issues or furthered the tolerance of LGBT people. The Brudner prize winner gives a Prize Lecture at Yale and in New York City. The prize comes with an award of $5,000.

James Brudner was an AIDS activist, urban planner, journalist, photographer and Yale GALA Member. A man of wit and compassion, outsized knowledge and curiosity, Jim valued both academic inquiry and direct action. He spent 12 years as a policy analyst for the City of New York. He also earned an MA in journalism from New York University and wrote for various publications on gay and AIDS-related topics. Jim became a member of ACT UP, the Treatment Action Group, and other organizations after the death of his twin brother, Eric, of AIDS in 1987. He worked on treatment and prevention issues with the National Institutes of Health, pharmaceutical corporations, and federal agencies. In his final years he devoted much of his time to traveling the back roads of rural America with a camera. La Mama Gallery in New York mounted an exhibition of his photographs in 1997. Jim died of AIDS-related illness on September 18, 1998 at the age of 37. Through his will, he established the Brudner Prize at Yale as “a perpetual annual prize” for scholarship and activism on gay and lesbian history and contemporary experience.

For more information about the life of Jim Brudner '83, please visit: http://yamp.org/Profiles/JimBrudner

Recipients of the Jim Brudner '83 Prize:

2000   George Chauncey
2001   Lillian Faderman
2002   Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
2003   Jonathan Ned Katz
2004   Judith Butler
2005   John D’Emilio
2006   Matt Coles
2007   B. Ruby Rich
2008-2009 Cathy Cohen
2009-2010 Edwin Cameron
2010-2011 Mary Bonauto
2011-2012 David M. Halperin
2012-2013 Samuel R. Delany
2013-2014 Cherríe Moraga 
2014-2015 Richard Dyer
2015-2016 Susan O. Stryker