Speaker Series | Sébastien Tremblay (Flensburg) A Badge of Injury: Pink Triangle and Queer Memories of National Socialism
When? Tuesday, 13 December. 16:15.
Where? Room 017, Landshuter Str. 4 (IOS / Graduate School)
This event is part of the Margins of Memory Speaker Series, organized by coordinators of the Early Career Research Network supported by the Leibniz ScienceCampus, Volha Bartash and Tatiana Klepikova. This session takes place in cooperation with the Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies.
This event is part of the Margins of Memory Speaker Series, which runs throughout the winter semester 2025/26. It is organized by the co-spokespeople of the Margins of Memory Early Career Research Network supported by the ScienceCampus. Find the full programme here
Abstract | In this talk, Dr. Sébastien Tremblay (Europa-Universität Flensburg) will explore the memory of the persecutions of queer individuals underNational Socialism. He will examine how symbols (circulated through printed media and displayed at protests) shaped a shared narrative of memory across the Euro-American world. The talk will address not only the successes of this collective remembrance andthe recognition of queerness as a key category within official, state-sanctioned memory of National Socialist crimes, but also the exclusions that have marginalized certain queer experiences in these debates. Drawing from his book A Badge of Injury (De Gruyter 2024), Dr. Tremblay will also emphasize the importance of provincializing queer history within and outside the Euro-American context and demonstrate the need to understand knowledge exchanges across languages from a transregional perspective.
Bio | Dr. Sébastien Tremblay (he/him) is research associate and lecturer at the Europa-University Flensburg. He is also an associated researcher in queer history at Goldsmiths, University of London in the UK. Born in Montreal / Tiohtià:ke, he obtained his doctorate from the Graduate School of Global Intellectual History in Berlin in 2020. His dissertation focused on the pink triangle as a symbol of gay and lesbian identities in the transatlantic world, more specifically in the FRG, in the USA and Canada. His doctoral research has earned him grants from the Halle Foundation for German American Relations, the Ernst Reuter Society, the German Research Foundation and the DAAD. Before Flensburg, Sébastien was a postdoctoral fellow at the International Research College of the DFG Cluster of Excellence 'SCRIPTS - Contestations of the Liberal Script' where he studied the link between a queer collective memory of National Socialism, the media construction of the 'homophobic migrant' and the link uniting borders and temporalities.
He has published several articles, book reviews and blog posts in French, English and German. His latest article on the pink triangle in the transatlantic world has been published in the most recent issue of Revue d’Allemagne et des Pays de Langue Allemande. He recently completed his monograph: A Badge of Injury: The Pink Triangle as Global Symbol of Gay and Lesbian Identities in the 20th Century. Outside of academia, Sébastien has worked as a consultant for the Schwules Museum in Berlin, the Goethe Institute, the Berlinale, and for Franco-German theatre plays presented at the Institut Français in Berlin.
