The 2025–26 Driggs Lecture visiting speaker will be Regina Kunzel, Larned Professor of History and of Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at Yale University. The title of the talk is "In the Shadow of Diagnosis: Psychiatric Power and Queer Life." (Please note: this event was postponed from last year.)

Presented by the Division of the Social Sciences and the University of Minnesota, Morris Alumni Association, the endowed Driggs Lecture was created in 1985 by alumni and friends of the late O. Truman Driggs, professor of history, who taught from 1963 until the time of his death in 1989. He served as the Division of the Social Sciences chair from 1968 until 1977. Annually, the lecture brings distinguished visitors to the Morris campus to speak on topics relating to history, the liberal arts, or public affairs. NOTE: this is a return of the Driggs Lecture series after several years' absence. Students, staff, and faculty will have opportunities to meet with Professor Kunzel during her visit to Morris.

Our speaker, Regina Kunzel, is an historian of the modern United States with interests in histories of gender and sexuality, queer history, the history of psychiatry, and the history of incarceration. 

Professor Kunzel’s most recent book, In the Shadow of Diagnosis: Psychiatric Power and Queer Life (University of Chicago, 2024), explores the encounter of queer and gender-variant people with psychiatry in the 20-century US. Her book Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality (University of Chicago Press, 2008), was awarded the American Historical Association’s John Boswell Prize, the Modern Language Association’s Alan Bray Memorial Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award, the Foundation for the Scientific Study of Sexuality’s Bonnie and Vern L. Bullough Award, and was a finalist for the American Studies Association’s John Hope Franklin Prize. She is also the author of Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890 to 1945 (Yale University Press, 1993). 

Professor Kunzel received her BA from Stanford University and PhD from Yale. She previously taught at Williams College, the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, and Princeton University. She has been awarded fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the Social Science Research Council, and is an elected member of the Society of American Historians.

This event is open to all, regardless of gender identity, sexual orientation, gender expression, race, ethnicity, or national origin.