The Trans Studies lecture was established in 2021, growing out of a Trans Summit hosted by the Division of Diversity and the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies in 2019. This year’s lecturer is Kadji Amin. Kadji Amin is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University. He is the author of Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History (Duke University Press, 2017), which won an Honorable Mention for the Alan Bray Memorial Award for best book in LGBT studies. Disturbing Attachments uses Genet to interrogate the desires that orient the field of Queer Studies. It demonstrates how contemporary queer attachments to non-normativity, sexual transgression, and political radicalism bear the stamp of recent gay American history. Ultimately, the book challenges scholars to disturb the desires of Queer Studies so that the field can reorient itself to an expanded range of geographic, historical, and racial subjects. This requires, first and foremost, challenging the idealizations of queer theory. Kadji is currently at work on two book projects: Trans Materialism without Gender Identity, an academic monograph that critiques gender identity as a midcentury psychiatric construct that has historically done transgender people more. harm than good; and Brown Trans Misfit, an experimental memoir that upends the conventions of trans narratives.