HWS News
28 August 2026 Bringing Hidden Histories to Light
Joshua Bastian Cole-Kurz connects scholarship on transgender history and media with contemporary theater and national conversations.
The Hobart and William Smith visiting assistant professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Intersectional Justice studies transgender representation across film, television and visual culture while exploring the histories that continue to shape contemporary understandings of gender and identity. Through recent scholarly and public-facing projects, Cole-Kurz has helped bring overlooked stories of transgender history to wider audiences.
Last year, Cole-Kurz wrote the dramaturgical essay, "Circling Time: Cercle Hermaphroditos and the Continuum of Trans History," for The Methuen Drama Book of Trans Plays, Volume 2, a landmark anthology featuring eight contemporary plays by transgender playwrights. His essay accompanies playwright Shualee Cook's Cercle Hermaphroditos, providing readers with historical context that connects nineteenth-century archival evidence with contemporary theatrical storytelling.
After publishing the essay, writer Molly Sprayregen interviewed Cole-Kurz for the publication LGBTQ Nation, where he discussed the history behind the Cercle Hermaphroditos, a little-known organization founded in New York City in the 1890s that is believed to be among the earliest known transgender advocacy and mutual aid groups in the United States.
The article explores how the secret society, which met above a Manhattan brothel, created a space where gender-diverse people could gather in community at a time when public understanding and acceptance were virtually nonexistent. Although the topic falls outside his primary area of research, Cole-Kurz's contribution places the organization within a broader history of transgender people building networks of care, belonging and collective resilience long before the modern LGBTQ rights movement.
To celebrate the publication of Volume 2, Cole-Kurz joined anthology co-editor Lindsey Mantoan for a virtual launch hosted by HowlRound, discussing the collection, his contribution and the role of theater in preserving and interpreting transgender histories. The anthology was also edited by Leanna Keyes and Angela Farr Schiller. This June, he also contributed to the anthology's third volume, a Young Adult edition, with an essay responding to a play about transgender athlete bans, another opportunity to apply his scholarship to a topic outside his usual research focus.
Published by Methuen Drama, the anthology features eight plays that center transgender life across the past, present and future, accompanied by critical essays that deepen readers' understanding of the works and the broader cultural conversations they inspire.
For Cole-Kurz, projects like The Methuen Drama Book of Trans Plays and the LGBTQ Nation feature are connected by a shared goal: recovering stories that have long been overlooked. "What draws me to this work is that so much of trans history has been there all along but has been misidentified or simply left out of the story," he says. "For me, recovering these histories is also a creative act. There's something very powerful about finding those people when you're living in the present. It makes the world feel less predetermined."
Together, the anthology and the LGBTQ Nation feature illustrate the interdisciplinary reach of Cole-Kurz's scholarship. Whether examining transgender representation in film and television, contributing historical context to contemporary theater or speaking with national media, his work explores how stories shape public understanding of identity, community and belonging.
At Hobart and William Smith, Cole-Kurz brings that same perspective into the classroom, encouraging students to think critically about history, media and social justice while considering whose stories are remembered—and whose have been overlooked. He believes that work is especially important today. "Recovering these stories feels particularly important right now because there's a real effort to make trans people seem new, or somehow outside of history," he says. "One of the simplest ways to push back against that is to remember. The more of these stories we recover, the less narrow our idea of trans history becomes—and the more room there is for all of us to imagine what a trans life can, did, does and will actually look like."
