Dear RSF:

Please join us next Wednesday, November 16th at 11 for Visiting Researcher Mignon Moore’s presentation, “Black, Sexual Minority Women in the Mid-Twentieth Century: A Search For Social Autonomy and Economic Freedom.”

Moore is the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Sociology and Sociology Department Chair at Barnard College, where she has been since 2016. Prior to coming to Barnard, she spent a decade at UCLA, where she was the co-director at the Resource Center for Minority Aging Research. Moore holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Chicago and a BA from Columbia University in Sociology. Her monograph, Invisible Families (University of California Press, 2011) won several awards from the American Sociological Association. Publisher’s link

She is currently working on a book for University of California Press analyzing oral histories and archival materials to chart the development of sexual community among working- and middle-class Black women who were migrants, children of migrants, or those already living in northern cities during the second Great Migration. Moore seeks to recover and engage aspects of life and politics that are seldom included in African American histories, LGBTQ histories, and women’s labor histories. The project centers sexual minority women because their stories are less told; understanding their experiences can help reveal how other statuses, such as racial minority membership and gender, influence how individuals come to understand and galvanize around same-sex desire.