Sébastien is a historian specialized in queer, global, and conceptual history. He received his PhD at the DFG Graduate School 'Global Intellectual History' at the Friedrich-Meinecke-Institute in 2020 and was awarded diverse fellowships by the Centre for Queer History at Goldsmiths, University of London. His dissertation focused on the pink triangle as a symbol of transatlantic identities and on the impacts of National Socialism for memory politics and LGBTQ+ social movements in the transatlantic world. He is currently working on his first monograph: A Badge of Injury: The Pink Triangle as a Global Symbol of Gay and Lesbian Identities. 

Research Interests

• German Vergangenheitsbewältigung
• Post-1945 German and North American LGBT History
• Multidirectional Memory
• Monuments and Symbols
• Visual History of Ideas
• Queer Temporalities
• Global Circulation of Knowledge
• Mechanisms of Exclusion
• Counterpublics

Current Research projects at SCRIPTS

Sébastien’s project offers a reinterpretation of border-making, international solidarities, and the construction of social movements by focussing on queer temporalities. It simultaneously investigates how contestations within the liberal script, especially of progress narratives, unveil the link between conceptions of time, identity construction, and the framing of race inside communities on the margin. In order to do so, it investigates how German gay and lesbian printed media discussed European integration, migration, and history at the end of the twentieth century. The project underlines how white gay and lesbian activists historicized their movement and used both the past and possible futures to center their whiteness, excluding or demonizing racialized communities, while campaigning internationally against homophobia.

SCRIPTS Working Paper Series

Tremblay, Sébastien 2022: Homosynchronism and the temporal-memory border: framing racialized bodies, time, and mobility in German queer printed media, SCRIPTS Working Paper No. 21, Berlin: Cluster of Excellence 2055 “Contestations of the Liberal Script (SCRIPTS)".

Journal Articles

Tremblay, Sébastien 2021 (forthcoming): Rosa Winkel et Pink Triangle. Comprendre la mémoire collective homosexuelle de la répression nazie dans une perspective transatlantique. Revue d’Allemagne et des pays de langue allemande, Les homosexualités dans l’espace Germanophone, 53(2).

Pernau, Margit/Tremblay, Sébastien 2020: Dealing with an Ocean of Meaninglessness: Reinhart Koselleck's Lava Memories and Conceptual History, Contributions to the History of Concepts 15(2): 7-28.

Tremblay, Sébastien 2019: Ich könnte ihren Schmerz körperlich spüren. Die Historisierung der NS-Verfolgung und die Wiederaneignung des Rosa Winkels in der westdeutschen Schwulenbewegung der 1970er Jahre 21, INVERTITO – Jahrbuch für die Geschichte der Homosexualitäten, Special Issue Verfolgung Homosexueller Männer und Frauen in der NS-Zeit, 179-202.

Tremblay, Sébastien 2015: And it is Still Not Much Different in Europe! Understanding and Translating Anxiety: Homophile Emotional Ties Across the Atlantic 1950-1965, Global Histories: A Student Journal 1(1): 61-78.

Other Publications

Tremblay, Sébastien 2021: Abtrünnige Queers und schwule Orthodoxie (transl. by Goltermann, Svenja/ Sarasin, Phillip). Geschichte der Gegenwart. 

Tremblay, Sébastien 2021: Apocryphal Queers and Gay Orthodoxy. The New Fascism Syllabus.  

Tremblay, Sébastien 2020: Wer zählt als Opfer? Einige Gedanken zu Gedächtnissymbolen und Legitimation, Hypotheses.