You can watch the event recording here:
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGyEiNfiyIE">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGyEiNfiyIE</a>
Join us on 25 February 2026 at 6.30pm for an online discussion celebrating LGBTQ+ History Month. How have queer lives been recorded, concealed, or deliberately erased in Britain and Germany across the 20th and 21st centuries? From criminalisation and censorship to activism, archives, and cultural memory, this event explores the forces that have shaped what we know – and don’t know – about LGBTQ+ histories. Bringing together historians and cultural scholars, the discussion examines how queer experiences have survived in personal testimony, art, and archives, and why uncovering these hidden histories matters today for identity, rights, and remembrance on both sides of the Channel. This event is organised in conjunction with Women in German Studies (W+IGS) and the Association for German Studies in Great Britain and Ireland (AGS).
Our speakers:
Professor Matt Cook is an English social and cultural historian specialising in LGBTQ and queer history, currently the Jonathan Cooper Chair of the History of Sexuality at Mansfield College, University of Oxford. He is known for his influential work on queer urban life, the history of homosexuality in Britain, and LGBTQ heritage.
Professor Helen Finch is a British academic who serves as Professor of German Literature at the University of Leeds, where her research focuses on the representation of the Holocaust in German-language literature, queer identity and memory, and issues of trauma and gender in cultural texts. She co-leads the Queer Area Studies Network and works across Holocaust, queer, and literary studies to explore memory, identity, and marginalised voices in German culture.
Dr Anna Hájková is Reader for modern European continental history at the University of Warwick. Her first book, The Last Ghetto: An Everyday History of Theresienstadt, came out in 2020 with Oxford University Press. She is a pioneer of queer Holocaust history and her work has been awarded the 2020 Orfeo Iris Prize. In 2025, she published People Without History are Dust with the University of Toronto Press. The book has won the National Jewish Book Award 2026.