George Chauncey

George Chauncey is Professor of History and American Studies.  He is the author of Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (Basic, 1994) and Why Marriage? The History Shaping Today's Debate over Gay Equality (Basic, 2004), the co-editor of Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (NAL, 1989), and the author of numerous articles on the history of gender and sexuality. He is currently nearing completion of another book, The Strange Career of the Closet: Gay Culture, Consciousness, and Politics from the Second World War to the Gay Liberation Era.  He received his doctorate in history from Yale and then taught for fifteen years at the University of Chicago before joining the Yale faculty in 2006.  While at Chicago, he co-chaired a year-long Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Sexual Identities and Identity Politics in Transnational Perspective (selected papers were published in 1999 as a special issue of GLQ: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies).  He also chaired The Future of the Queer Past, a four-day transnational history conference held at Chicago in September 2000 that drew together 200 historians from a dozen countries to present their work on some fifty panels.  Since 1993, he has participated as a historian in twelve gay rights cases, including Lawrence v. Texas (2003), for which he organized and was lead author of the Historians' Amicus Brief, and Romer v. Evans (1996) and Perry v. Schwarzenegger (the on-going challenge to California’s Proposition 8), in which he testified at trial as an expert witness on the history of antigay discrimination.

Joanne Meyerowitz

Joanne Meyerowitz, Professor of History and American Studies, earned her doctorate at Stanford University.  She is the author of How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (Harvard University Press, 2002) and Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880-1930 (University of Chicago Press, 1988), the editor of History and September 11th (2003) and Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960 (1994), and the co-editor of “Sexing Women’s History” (1998), a special issue of the Journal of Women’s History.  Before joining the faculty at Yale, she taught at Indiana University and the University of Cincinnati, and edited the Journal of American History, the leading scholarly journal in U.S. history.  While at Indiana, she served on the Board of Trustees of the Kinsey Institute for Research on Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, organized a summer institute there on the history of sexuality, and helped plan an international conference on “Women’s Sexualities” that marked the fiftieth anniversary of Kinsey’s volume on women.  Her articles on gender and sexuality have appeared in the American Historical Review, Journal of American History, Journal of Women’s History, Gender and History, GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, and other publications.   Her most recent essays include “‘How Common Culture Shapes the Separate Lives’:  Sexuality, Race, and Mid-Twentieth-Century Social Constructionist Thought,” Journal of American History (March 2010); “Transnational Sex and U.S. History,”American Historical Review (December 2009); and “A History of ‘Gender,’” American Historical Review (December, 2008).