Experts Guide for the Media

Jennifer Brier

Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and History

Biography

Jennifer Brier

Historian Jennifer Brier’s research and teaching are largely focused on exploring the historical intersections of gender, race and sexuality with particular attention to the history of HIV/AIDS. She is also a leader in the field of public history and works to make history accessible and meaningful to communities.

Brier serves as project director of History Moves, a mobile public history project that asks community members to think about how and why history matters to them. History Moves has built two major exhibitions and public programs: “I’m Still Surviving: A Living Women’s History of HIV/AIDS,” and “Listening for the Long Haul: A Living History of Long COVID.”

Her book, “Infectious Ideas: U.S. Political Response to the AIDS Crisis,” argued that AIDS provides the perfect lens through which to see the complex social and political history of the 1980s and 1990s and that health is always more than the absence of disease.

Brier curated the award-winning exhibition “Out in Chicago” at the Chicago History Museum. This exhibition combined the history of sexuality with urban history, making a case for understanding Chicago as a queer crossroads. The exhibition catalog and anthology, “Out in Chicago: LGBT History at the Crossroads,” was co-edited with Jill Austin. Brier curated Surviving and Thriving: AIDS, Politics and Culture, a traveling exhibition on the history of AIDS for the National Library of Medicine.