Join us for an evening conversation with Dr. Alexandra Juhasz (Distinguished Professor of Film at Brooklyn College, CUNY) and Theodore Kerr (The New School) on their new book We are Having This Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production (Duke University Press) at the Stanford Humanities Center as part of the SHC lecture series How Change Comes: Knowledge + Justice. Dr. Jamal Batts will introduce the authors and facilitate the Q&A.

This event is co-sponsored with the Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stanford and Queer Student Resources.

Dr. Alexandra Juhasz (CUNY) has been making and thinking about AIDS activist video since the mid-80s. She is the author of AIDS TV: Identity, Community and Alternative Video (Duke, 1995), and a large number of AIDS educational videos including Living with AIDS: Women and AIDS (1987 with Jean Carlomusto), Safer and Sexier: A College Student's Guide to Safer Sex (1991), and Video Remains (2005). Most recently she’s been engaging in cross-generational dialogue with AIDS activists and scholars such as Jih-Fei Cheng and Nishant Shahani, AIDS and the Distribution of Crises (Duke 2020), the connections between HIV+COVID with the collaborative What Would an HIV Doula Do? and Long Covid with Pato Hebert.

Theodore (ted) Kerr is a writer and organizer whose work focuses primarily on HIV / AIDS. He curated the U.S.’s National Libraries of Medicine exhibition AIDS, Poster, and Stories of Public Health: A People’s Pandemic. In 2020, Kerr worked with the New York City AIDS Memorial as a creative consultant on HEAR ME, an audio installation at the memorial, that also resulted in A Time To Listen, a multi part online conversation series. In 2016 and 2017 Kerr performed 10 interviews for the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art's Visual Arts and the AIDS Epidemic: An Oral History Project. In 2019, Kerr was the editor of an issue of On Curating entitled "What You Don’t Know About AIDS Could Fill A Museum."

Dr Jamal Batts (Art and Art History, Stanford) is a scholar, writer, and curator from Virginia Beach, VA. His work reflects on the relationship between Black queer contemporary visual art and the intricacies of sexual risk. Recently, he curated the 2022 University of Pennsylvania MFA thesis exhibition Imperative of Struggle. His writing appears in the catalogue for The New Museum’s exhibition Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon, Open Space, ASAP/J, New Life Quarterly, and SFMOMA’s website in conjunction with their Modern Cinema series. He is a member of the curatorial collective The Black Aesthetic who have organized four seasons of black experimental film screenings and published three edited collections. In 2019 he curated film screenings and conducted artist discussions for the SFMOMA exhibition SOFT POWER.