Faculty

Theodore (Ted) Kerr is a writer, educator, cultural organizer and artist whose work explores the history and ongoing impact of HIV/AIDS through the lenses of art, activism, and community storytelling.

He is the co-author of We Are Having This Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production (Duke University Press, 2022, with Alexandra Juhasz).

He curated the 2021 exhibition AIDS, Posters and Stories of Public Health: A People's Pandemic for the National Libraries of Medicine.

He is a founding member of the international collective What Would an HIV Doula Do?

He was one of 4 oral historians who worked on Visual Arts and the AIDS Epidemic: An Oral History Project for the Smithsonian, Archives for American Art in 2017 / 2018.

Kerr earned his MA from Union Theological Seminary where he researched Christian Ethics and HIV, and his BA from the New School where he was Riggio Writing and Democracy fellow. At his graduation he spoke about the queer everyday in surviving. 

2016  M.A., Theology, Union Theological Seminary

2014 B.A., The New School for Public Engagement, The New School

PUBLICATIONS AS AUTHOR     Books 2022  We Are Having this Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production, with   Alexandra Juhasz, Duke University Press

Peer-Reviewed Articles 2026 “Gay Uncles,” QED - A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, Forthcoming 2023 “When We're Coming From: What Would an HIV Doula Do? on Pandemic Time(s),” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies - Vol. 44, Issue. 1, (co-author) 2020 “How To Live With…,” QED - A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking - Vol. 7, No. 3 2016 “AIDS 1969: HIV, History…,” Drain Journal, AIDS and Memory – Vol. 13:2 2014 “Who is HIV for?” Women’s Studies Quarterly, Solidarity - Vol 42: 3,4

Book Chapters 2026 “Safer History Kits: Day With(out) Art Video Broadsides and the Distribution of the Past,”  Presence/Absence: 30 Years of Day With(out) Art, Eds: Kyle Croft and Risa Puleo 2024 “Memorialisation within an ongoing crisis: Learning from COVID-19, HIV/AIDS and the Overdose Response Activists,” The HIV and COVID-19 pandemics: Viral Times, Eds: Maurice Nagington, Peter Aggleton, Jamie Garcia Iglesias 2021 “The Conversations We Need to Save Each Other's Lives,” with charles ryan long, Between Certain Death and a Possible Future, Ed: M. Sycamore 2019 “Globalization(s), Roundtable,” AIDS and the Distribution of Crisis, Eds: J.F. Cheng, N. Shahani

PUBLICATIONS AS EDITOR  2024 “Community Knowledge Practice,” Visual AIDS Journal 2019  “What You Don’t Know about AIDS Could Fill A Museum,” On Curating, Issue 42 2014 “Time Is Not A Line,” We Who Feel Differently Journal, Issue 3