Organized by the Lesbian and Gay Studies Project of the Center for Gender Studies and the Department of History of the University of Chicago, with the assistance of an external advisory committee. THE FUTURE OF THE QUEER PAST, an international meeting of historians and other scholars studying historical processes from diverse disciplinary perspectives, will be held at the University of Chicago on Thursday-Sunday, September 14-17, 2000. Faculty, graduate students, artists, curators, and independent scholars studying a wide range of issues throughout the world and across history are expected to participate.

The conference offers historians, other interested scholars, and artists a rare and critically important opportunity to meet one another and to collectively chart the development of the field, assess its strengths and weaknesses, and explore new directions for its future. The conference's transnational thematic organization also encourages historians to reassess the periodizations and explanatory frameworks they have developed for particular periods and national histories by placing them in a broader historical and transnational context, as well as to track and explore the ramifications of the transnational circulation of people, discourses, and social movements, and to compare developments in different localities and explore the connections among them.

We also intend to make the performance and critical analysis of creative interventions into popular historical memory a central part of the conference, and to bring scholars and artists concerned with historical issues into conversation with one another.