May 30-June 6: New York City!

Highlights while we’re in NY include:

• Guided tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art with Dr. Jonathan Katz
• Walking tour of historic LGBTQ NY with Dr. Andrew Lear
• ACT UP collaborations, education, and projects
• Lesbian Herstory Archives visit and research time with Deb Edel
• Spencer Cox Center for Health visit
• NY Public Library Archives, LGBTQ and ACT UP collections
• Stonewall Inn visit with a veteran of the 1969 riots
• Broadway show: Hedwig and the Angry Inch
• Visit to the Museum of Sex

June 6 we fly overnight and arrive in Paris on June 7!

June 7-14 we are in Paris, with a day-trip to Amsterdam on June 10

Highlights while we are in Europe include:

• Visit with Historian Dr. Nina Kushner to learn about sexuality in 18th and 19th century Paris
• ACT UP Paris meeting and project
• Tours of the Musee D’Orsay, Louvre, and Musee de l’erotisme
• Exploration of Monmartre, the historic bohemian/queer distric
• Meeting with the Couvent de Paname – Les Soeurs de la Perpetuelle Indulgence
• Visiting the Shoah memorial, deportation monument, and sites of memorialization to victims of the Holocaust
• High speed train to Amsterdam to visit the Homomonument and the Museum of the Resistance
• Walking the historic streets of the Marais

And SO MUCH MORE!

Six-Week Summer Term, 2015 (May 18 – June 26, 2015)

Travel Dates: May 30 – June 14, 2015

People never simply have sex; at some level of consciousness, they interpret their behavior in terms of their own and their culture’s attitudes toward sex. . . .the meanings ascribed to sex vary from one culture to another, from one place to another, and from one time to another.  Historian Richard Godbeer (1995)

WELCOME TO OUR COURSE BLOG!  From this website, we will share our reflections, ideas, knowledge, research, emotions, hopes, plans, projects, photos, video clips, questions, and our overall experience as active learners in this study abroad. This site is DYNAMIC and we encourage YOU to provide us with feedback by leaving comments and questions during this experience.  Don’t be shy…we sure aren’t!

Some background about this study abroad:

This six week, six credit hour experience is a collaboration between Dr. Yvonne Pitts (Associate Professor, Department of History), and Mr. Lowell Kane (Director, LGBTQ Center – Division of Diversity and Inclusion) at Purdue University.

This course explores LGBTQ history and culture from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries in three cities: New York City, Paris, France, and Amsterdam, Netherlands.  Taking a comparative approach, we examine the changing meanings of same-sex sexual desire, acts, and identities.  We will uncover and recover  how people formed communities around shared sexual and gender identities and how those communities developed and survived, often in the face of devastating, often violent, social, legal, and economic oppressions.

We will focus on three major themes:

1. Historical identity

2. Liberation and regulation

3. Community and cultural expression

Learning Outcomes:

1. With intense academic classroom instruction and an immersive cultural experience students will connect how historical dynamics shape present realities.

2. Students will gain a comparative, international experience, which will challenge assumptions about the historical invisibility of LGBTQ communities and historical sexual diversity.

3. Students will see first-hand how historical systems of sexual oppression inform contemporary attitudes and social problems through service learning.

4. Students will engage in service learning experiences designed to encourage future activism and community involvement.