The Ivy Bookshop is hosting "Vital Perspectives On Healthcare And Science: Whitney Strub Queer Newark" on April 17, 2024. The event will feature Dr. Whitney Strub, author of the book "Queer Newark", in conversation with Dr. Jason Chernesky. They will be joined by Dr. Zenzele Isoke and Dr. Jo Giardini. The event aims to engage with pressing public health issues through the lens of Strub's book, which explores the overlooked queer histories of Newark, New Jersey. Typically, histories of LGBTQ urban life focus on major metropolitan areas, but this event seeks to shed light on the queer communities in economically depressed cities with majority Black and Hispanic populations, like Newark. Dr. Whitney Strub is a scholar who writes about political, legal, and cultural battles over obscenity and pornography, situating these social struggles in various contexts such as modern feminism, LGBTQ history, the rise of the New Right, and the sexual revolution. His previous books include "Perversion for Profit: The Politics of Pornography and the Rise of the New Right" and "Obscenity Rules: Roth v. United States and the Long Struggle over Sexual Expression". Dr. Jason Chernesky is a historian of 20th-century medicine, healthcare, public health, and environments in the United States, with a focus on race-based health inequities among American children and their families. He recently earned his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and is working on a book proposal based on his doctoral dissertation, "The Littlest Victims": Pediatric AIDS and the Urban Ecologies of Health in the Late-Twentieth-Century United States. Dr. Jo Giardini is a post-doctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University, currently writing on the politics of communalism and separatism in the 1970s, and working on a critical history of the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic and its relationship to trans communities in Baltimore. Dr. Zenzele Isoke is a black feminist theorist, urban ethnographer, and political storyteller, whose scholarship spans several cities in the U.S., the Middle East, and the Caribbean. Her book project "Unheard Voices at the Bottom of Empire" explores black feminist politics through collaborative art-making, breath and meditation, and grassroots organizing in racially segregated urban spaces. The event promises to be an engaging evening of scholarship made accessible, opening conversation around the book "Queer Newark" and the histories it reveals. Attendees are encouraged to RSVP and order a copy of the book in advance.