The impact of Russia’s war against Ukraine can be felt far outside the actual battlefield. Modern war disproportionately affects gender and sexual minorities, something we are seeing in Ukraine even as Putin's anti-LGBTQ+ agenda seeks to relentlessly drive support for the war at home. How can a queer-studies focus advance conversations about decolonization in East European and Eurasian Studies? To address this question, Queer Focus will have six virtual panels featuring speakers from various disciplines and institutions. Panelists and participants will explore how gendered regimes were constitutive of Russo-centric relationships of power, defining the region and how we study it, as we collectively grapple with what it means to re-examine our current research, teaching, and institutional practices.

Peter Thilly is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Mississippi and author of The Opium Business: A History of Crime and Capitalism in Maritime China. He is currently working on a transnational history of the 1853 Small Sword Uprising, tentatively entitled "Small Sword, Big Trouble."

In 1870s China, opium was a legal item of trade. It was also one of the most commonly smuggled goods, and the target of intense contestation between business and government elites. This talk will explain how the people who bought and sold opium made themselves indispensable to the late Qing Self-Strengthening movement. It will examine the opium business in the age of legal opium, and demonstrate how the tax-farming arrangements launched in the late 1850s came to support the late Qing fiscal-military state in an uneven way, by providing essential funds to the local state while also embedding wealthy opium traders in positions of unchecked power.