Roderick Ferguson invited to deliver Princeton's 2025–26 Gauss Seminars in Criticism
Ferguson, William Robertson Coe Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Professor of American Studies and Black Studies, is widely recognized as a leading thinker on gender, race, queerness. The Gauss Seminars in Criticism are among Princeton's longest running and best-known public lecture series.
Roderick Ferguson, William Robertson Coe Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Professor of American Studies and Black Studies, has been invited to deliver Princeton University's prestigious Gauss Seminars in Criticism for the 2025–26 academic year.
The Gauss Seminars are among Princeton’s longest running and best-known public lecture series. The seminars are led by invited guests who present work in progress and provide space for Princeton's campus community to have a focused discussion about ideas in the humanities.
“I’m really honored to be asked to give next year’s lectures, particularly for such a historic series,” said Ferguson of the invitation.
Ferguson is widely recognized as a leading thinker on gender, race, queerness, and how these concepts intersect with American institutions including higher education. His work is highly interdisciplinary—ranging across American Studies, gender studies, queer studies, cultural studies, African American Studies, sociology, literature, and education—and has introduced methods and vocabulary that have shaped how fellow scholars analyze and critique gender and race in relation to American institutions.
He is the author more than thirty scholarly articles and four books: One-Dimensional Queer (Polity, 2019), We Demand: The University and Student Protests (University of California Press, 2017), The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), and Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (University of Minnesota Press, 2004).
Ferguson is currently working on two monographs—In View of the Tradition: Black Art and Radical Thought (forthcoming from Fordham University Press, 2026), and The Bookshop of Black Queer Diaspora.
He joined Yale's faculty in 2019 after being on the faculty at the University of Minnesota and the University of Illinois, Chicago. He has also held fellowships at Princeton University and the University of California Humanities Research Institute. Ferguson was named the William Robertson Coe Professor in 2021 in recognition of his field-defining scholarship, and has been deeply involved on Yale's campus and beyond—acting as department chair and chairing the faculty advisory committee of the Yale Prison Education Initiative.
Since 1949, the Gauss Seminars in Criticism have featured a range of eminent thinkers including Erich Auerbach, Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler, W. H. Auden, Noam Chomsky, Julia Kristeva, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Edward Said, and Joan Scott.