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

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with professor Petrus Liu, who is professor of Chinese & Comparative Literature and of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Boston University.  Professor Liu is the author of Queer Marxism in Two Chinas (Duke University Press, 2015) and The Specter of Materialism: Queer Theory and Marxism in the Age of the Beijing Consensus (Duke University Press, 2023), and other many other publications.  Gossett speaks with Liu about how he sutures together queer theory, gender and sexuality studies and Marxist thought, and about how the analysis of racial capitalism requires a global scope. 

Song credits (-30sec): "Feeling Fuzzy" and "Kids Go Down" by Chinese American Bear

In this episode FQT associate director Che Gossett speaks with multimedia artist, director, and producer Zackary Drucker about her archival work on and connection to Flawless Sabrina, about being attuned to the spiritual realm, and her prodigious work in TV & film -- especially her co-directed Sundance award-winning and Emmy nominated HBO original documentary film The Stroll (2023) and the HBO documentary series The Lady and the Dale (2021).