This roundtable will consider the unique challenges and opportunities of researching and teaching global queer and trans* history. Together, participants working on divergent contexts of pre-nineteenth-century Africa, the late Ottoman Empire, and twentieth-century Europe will offer multiple points of entry to how we think about global processes. Integrating nationally or regionally specific research into a global frame presents us with a set of questions together with productive pathways for future research. What categories and tools should we use to make legible gender and sexual non-normativity in the past, particularly when gender and sexuality are historically-contingent and globally incoherent concepts? How do we understand the relationship between colonial expansion and the production of modern sexual identities? What do we do when we encounter uncomfortable histories that seem to undermine the impulse to present a useable past? How could a trans-historical and transcontinental approach offer bridges between disconnected subfields? How might queer history function as pedagogical practice? Participants will engage with these questions while offering further strategies to research and teach global queer and trans* histories in our present moment. At precisely the moment in which global queer and trans* history is rapidly expanding, proliferating across course catalogues and bookshelves, legislative backlash is working to undermine the ways that these histories can be taught and studied. In many respects, the need for queer and trans* history has never been greater, challenging us to reconcile political imperative and historical complexity.