DIRECTOR AND TEAM

Photo: Joseph Rodriguez, Meatpacking District New York City, c. 1977

Stefanos Milkidis

Director

Stefanos Milkidis is a New York-based scholar, artist and educator, whose practice spans between research, writing, and creative production. His work focuses on the intersections of queer theory, human geography, social and cultural ruminations on space, urban histories, and visual culture studies. Within this matrix of perceptions and interpretations, Stefanos explores an array of texts and images in which the representation of queer space provides an occasion for further and deeper considerations of fragmented histories, counter-knowledges, buried memories, and bygone practices. This line of research aims to make significant contributions not only to the reclaiming of forgotten, neglected or distorted narratives—which are nonetheless properly irreducible for queer historiography—but also towards an understanding of how queers currently use the city in a neoliberal context with excessive state monitoring, surveillance, and policing. Siding with the ethos of a radically defined approach to preserve both lost and extant queer spaces, he advocates for a sex-positive response to neoliberalism and other forms of oppression.

Stefanos has an academic training in visual arts (B.A., M.A., M.F.A) and American Studies (M.A.), currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Historical Geography in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at The Graduate Center, CUNY. His investigations coalesce around queerscapes and counterpublics with a particular focus on New York City.

An Adjunct Professor at two CUNY colleges, he teaches “American Government” at BMCC, and “Introduction to Geography” at Lehman College. Since Spring 2020, he has been a visiting lecturer in the Math and Science department at Pratt Institute, teaching hybrid courses in earth and environmental sciences and cultural studies.

Stefanos is the recipient of a Connect NY Fellowship for the summer of 2019.

Immigrant

Queer

Feminist

Environmentalist

Human Rights Advocate

Black

Queer

Geographer

Feminist

Ricardo Millhouse

Ricardo is a PhD Candidate in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. His research both dialogues with and contributes to fields that are rarely drawn into conversation: Urban geography and Black queer studies. As a humanistic social scientist, Ricardo expands the scope of spatial knowledge to include Black LBGT spatial experiences in social spaces throughout the twenty-first century. Ricardo analyzes spatial sensations, nostalgia, and atmosphere in and across queer spaces while attending to the ways in which gentrification continues to displace physical Black queer social spaces. In addition, he links physical spatio-historical processes of extraction to the sensual geographic experiences that are emplaced in Black queer social spaces to build a theoretical edifice he calls Black queer spatiality.

Yannis Nomikos

Yannis Nomikos is an architect by training, living and working in Xanthi, Greece and Istanbul, Turkey. His research explores the production of gendered space; specifically, issues of accessibility and division of public spaces based on the binary understanding of gender in Greece and Turkey. He further explores the gendered nature of domestic space in the Eastern Mediterranean through the institution of marriage and the inevitable changes that come with the interaction of secular Western European cultures. Using gender-based analysis of how spaces and places become products of the patriarchal system, Yannis examines possible strategies to address gender inequalities and differences pertaining to other categories, like class, race, and age.

The Queer Space Studies Initiative