FQT Podcast

In this episode, FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with author, film producer and director, actor and model, Geena Rocero about Horse Barbie: A Memoir of Reclamation (Random House, 2003), her modeling, directing and acting careers, her public advocacy work, trans diaspora, spirituality, and her new short film Dolls.  Music cred: "QC Gurlz" by Stef Aranas

In this (first of two parts) episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Professor Susan Stryker. Stryker is Professor Emerita of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Arizona, as well as Distinguished Visitor and 2025-2026 Faculty Research Fellow at Stanford University's Clayman Institute for Gender Research.  Stryker has served as Visiting Professor of Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University, and Barbara Lee Distinguished Chair in Women's Leadership, Mills College. She is an executive editor of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, and as co-editor of the Duke University Press book series ASTERISK: gender, trans-, and all that comes after. Stryker is the author of Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution (2008, 2017), co-editor of the two-volume Transgender Studies Reader (2006, 2013) and The Transgender Studies Reader Remix (2022), as well as  co-director of the Emmy-winning documentary film Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton's Cafeteria (2005).  In episode one of a two part interview, Stryker discusses her field defining scholarship in trans studies, the new of her writing anthology edited by Professor McKenzie Wark, When Monsters Speak: A Susan Stryker Reader (Duke University Press, 2024), and her recent scholarship bringing together abolitionist politics and trans architectural imaginaries.   Music: "Scary Monsters and Super Creeps," David Bowie

In this episode, FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with psychoanalyst and scholar Avgi Saketopoulou, who is the 2025-26 Avenali Chair in the Humanities at UC Berkeley, about her book Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (NYU Press, 2023), and the entanglements of race, gender, sexuality and psychoanalysis.   Music Credit: "Consideration" by Rihanna and SZA

In this episode FQT associate director speaks with Harvard Law professor Michael J. Klarman about his award winning scholarship in civil rights and legal history, including From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality (Oxford University Press, 2004) which received the 2005 Bancroft Prize in History, and his newest book, The Framer's Coup: the making of the United States Constitution (Oxford UP, 2016) which was a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize and the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel Award.   Music Credit: "Animosity" by Tupac

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Professor David Joselit.  Joselit is  Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Art, Film, and Visual Studies and Chair for Art, Film, and Visual Studies (AFVS) at Harvard University.  Joselit began his career as a curator at The ICA in Boston from 1983-1989. After receiving his PhD from Harvard in 1995, he has also taught at the University of California, Irvine, and Yale University where he was Department Chair of History of Art from 2006-09, and the CUNY Graduate Center. Some of Joselit's most recent books are After Art (Princeton University Press, 2012) and Heritage and Debt: Art in Globalization (MIT, 2020) which was awarded the 2021 Robert Motherwell Book Award, and Art's Properties (Princeton University Press, 2023).  Gossett speaks with Joselit about his work as a curator, art historian and about art in an era of globalization.   Music Credit:  "erratum Musical (for three voices)" by Marcel Duchamp

In this episode FQT associate director and podcast host Che Gossett speaks with critic, essayist, curator, and professor Nora Khan.  Nora Khan recently served as the Arts Council Professor at UCLA in Design Media Arts. Her writing on philosophy of artificial intelligence and emergent technologies is referenced heavily across disciplinary formations in the humanities and the arts. Her books include AI Art and the Stakes for Art Criticism (2025), Seeing, Naming, Knowing (2019) and Fear Indexing the X-Files (2017), with Steven Warwick. She is a member of the Curatorial Ensemble of the 2026 edition of Counterpublic, one of the nation's largest public civic exhibitions, focused next on 'Near Futures', and she also curated Manual Override at The Shed (2020). Khan discusses art and technology, AI, her craft as a writer and curator, and her pedagogy. Music Credit:  "One Fateful Night" from the Earthbound soundtrack

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Kellie Jones, Professor in Art History and Archaeology and the Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS) at Columbia University.  Professor Jones is a 2016 MacArthur Foundation Fellow, and the recipient of numerous awards for her scholarship and curation.  Professor Jones is the author of EyeMinded: Living and Writing Contemporary Art (Duke, 2011), and South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s (Duke, 2017), which was named a Best Art Book of 2017 in The New York Times. She has worked as a curator for over three decades and her exhibition "Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980," at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, was named one of the best exhibitions of 2011 and 2012 by Artforum, and the best thematic show nationally by the International Association of Art Critics (AICA).  Professor Jones discusses her extensive scholarship and exhibition curation, growing up embedded in a remarkable artistic community in New York City, the influence of her friends, neighbors and especially her parents, esteemed poets Amiri Baraka and Hettie Jones on her life and work.   Music Credit: Ornette Coleman, Eventually

In this episode, FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Huey Copeland, Andrew W. Mellon Chair and Professor of Modern Art and Black Study at the University of Pittsburgh, about his work in art history, criticism, and Black diasporic and contemporary art.  Professor Copeland is the author of the critically acclaimed book Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America (Chicago, 2013), co-editor of the award-winning volume Black Modernisms in the Transatlantic World (National Gallery of Art and Yale University Press, 2023), as well over 70 essays, interviews, and reviews that have appeared in a range of journals and exhibition catalogues, including Artforum International, Histórias Afro-Atlânticas: Antologia, Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art, Nka, and Represenations.   Music Credit: Grace Jones, Pull Up to the Bumper

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with poet and professor Tracy K. Smith.  Smith served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States, and her book of poetry Life on Mars (Greywolf Press, 2011) received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize.  Smith is Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute as well as professor of English and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.  Smith discusses her numerous works of poetry, and her recent, more essayistic book, To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul (Penguin, 2023), the poetics of blackness, the significance of the ancestral for her life and work and how her critical inhabitation of spirituality shapes her work.    

In this episode Che Gossett, associate director of the Center for Research in Feminist, Queer and Transgender Studies at the University of Pennsylvania speaks with the authors of Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction (Northwestern UP, 2024) professors Steven Swarbrick of CUNY and Jean Thomas Tremblay of York University.  They discuss the concept of negative life, the contemporary politics of ecocriticism, film theory, psychoanalysis, and queer studies.    Music Credit: The Day the World Turned Day-Glo, by X-Ray Spex

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Jina B. Kim, who is assistant professor of English Language & Literature and of the Study of Women & Gender at Smith College, about her forthcoming book, Care at the End of the World: Dreaming of Infrastructure: Crip-of-Color Writing after the U.S. Welfare State (Duke UP, March 2025).  Professor Kim speaks about her articulation of a "crip-of-color critique," and how feminist- and queer-of-color literary responses to state austerity measures -- as seen in the work of writers such as Audre Lorde, Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and others -- provide critical imaginaries wherein dependency figures not as lack, but rather, as an indispensable resource for crisis laden times. Music Credit: "Bird" by Gaelynn Lea

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with literary theory, philosophy, and subaltern studies scholar Professor Gayatri Spivak, who is University Professor in the department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, the 2012 recipient of the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy, and the author of numerous field shaping books and articles, including A Critique of Postcolonial Reason Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Harvard UP, 1999), Readings (2014) and texts of critical essays including Outside in the Teaching Machine (Routledge, 2008), and An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (Harvard UP, 2013).  In this episode, Professor Spivak speaks about concepts such as affirmative sabotage, as well as the pedagogical, affective and epistemological labor of rearranging desires, as well as her rigorous work on W.E.B. Du Bois's legacy, scholarship, and archive. Music: "Evil Does not Exist v. 2" by Eiko Ishibashi

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Roderick Ferguson, professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and American Studies at Yale University. Ferguson was the 2018-2019 president of the American Studies Association.  He is the author of One-Dimensional Queer (Polity, 2019), We Demand: The University and Student Protests (University of California, 2017), The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (University of Minnesota, 2012), and Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (University of Minnesota, 2004).     Song Credit: Adrian Piper being interviewed about and performing her street performance piece "Mythic Being", excerpted from "Other Than Art's Sake" a film by Peter Kennedy from 1973

In this episode, recorded during fall semester 2023, FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Calvin Warren, associate professor of African American Studies at Emory University about his book Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism and Emancipation (Duke UP, 2018), and his thoughts on Black nihilism and spirituality.    Music credits: "There Are Other Worlds (Have They Not Told You Of) by Sun Ra

In this conversation FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with poet, author and professor Jackie Wang.  Wang is an assistant professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California and the author of Carceral Capitalism (Semiotext(e), 2018), and Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun (Semiotext(e), 2023), as well as works of poetry, such as The Sunflower Cast A Spell To Save Us From The Void (Nightboat, 2021).  In this expansive conversation, Wang discusses her work on carceral technologies -- including AI -- surveillance, and extraction, as well as her interests in pyschoanalysis, mysticism, and tracing the concept of the oceanic in psychoanalytic and Black thought.   Music Credit: "Ocean of Tears" by Caroline Polachek

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett interviews novelist Torrey Peters about her intellectual and writerly formation, her early online novella publications, The Masker and Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, and her novel Detransition Baby (One World, 2021) which received the the 2021 PEN/Hemingway award for debut fiction, and was also named a Best Book of the Century by the New York Times. Peters also speaks about her forthcoming collection, Stag Dance (Random House, 2025), the fascinating history and idiom of queer and trans lumberjack culture, and fashioning queer and trans literary worlds.   Music Credit: "I Can't Shake the Stranger Out of You," Lavender Country

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Paul Gilroy, who is Professor of the Humanities and Founding Director of the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism & Racialisation at University College London. Professor Gilroy's scholarship has been globally influential, especially his books There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack(1987), The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), and Against Race (2000). In 2019 Professor Gilroy was awarded the Holberg Prize by the government of Norway in recognition of his scholarship. Che Gossett speaks with Professor Gilroy about his intellectual itinerary, his early career as a journalist, and then as a graduate student working under the tutelage of Stuart Hall, and about the field of Black studies in the UK, radical humanism, and the state of the university.   Music credit: "Move on Up" (Extended Version) by Curtis Mayfield

In this episode, FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Amy Tobin, University of Cambridge Associate Professor in the History of Art and Curator of Contemporary Programmes, at Kettle's Yard, about feminist art history, feminist art curation, coalitional politics and her book, Women Artists Together Art in the Age of Women's Liberation (Yale UP, 2023), as well as her 2014 article, co-authored with Victorian Horne, "An unfinished revolution in art historiography, or how to write a feminist art history" in feminist review.    

In this episode, FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with Austin Svedjan, doctoral student and Hamilton-Law Graduate Fellow in the Department of English at Penn, and John Paul Ricco, professor of Art History at the University of Toronto, about their co-edited special issue of the journal Postmodern Culture, which is freely available online. Song credit: "If You Can't Help Me" by Brontez Purnell.

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with scholar Colby Gordon, who is associate professor in Department of Literatures in English at Bryn Mawr College, about early modern trans studies and theology, and his exciting new and first book, Glorious Bodies: Trans Theology and Renaissance Literature (University of Chicago, 2024). Song credit (-30sec): "My Enemies are Mine" by Jim Strong