Faculty

Carolyn Dean

Email:

Carolyn J. Dean is Charles J. Stille Professor of History and French. She is a historian of modern Europe with a focus on the twentieth century whose work explores the intersection of ideas and culture, most recently in the context of genocide. Her latest book, The Moral Witness: Trials and Testimony after Genocide (Cornell, forthcoming 2019) traces the history of the witness to genocide, tracking the changing representation of violence over the last hundred years and demonstrating how the cultural meaning of genocide was distinguished from war and imperial conquest. She is the author of five other books that focus on the historical and cultural representation of victims, most recently Aversion and Erasure: The Fate of the Victim after the Holocaust (Cornell, 2010) and The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust (Cornell, 2004). She has also written extensively about gender and sexuality in France and on the intellectual history of French theory. She held the John Hay Professor of International Studies at Brown University, where she taught before coming to Yale in 2013, and has been the recipient of several fellowships, including an ACLS and a Guggenheim, among others. In 1996 she was awarded Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Council for the Advancement of Support of Education.

Geography:

Western Europe

Thematic:

Cultural

Gender & Sexuality

Historiography

Intellectual

Omnia El Shakry

Omnia El Shakry is Professor of History, specializing in the intellectual and cultural history of the modern Middle East. She is the author of The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt and editor of Gender and Sexuality in Islam. She is currently working on a book project, tentatively titled, Decolonizing Psychoanalysis, which rethinks key meta-psychological concepts – such as the unconscious, imagination, ethics, and embodiment – by drawing upon non-Western theory and apophatic theology while exploring the Arabic translation of Sigmund Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.

Crystal Feimster

Email:

crystal.feimster@yale.edu

Crystal Feimster, Associate Professor of American Studies and African American Studies, is a scholar of nineteenth- and twentieth-century US women’s history and African American history who studies racial and sexual violence, social movements, war, law, and citizenship. She is particularly interested in how sexuality informs racial and gender politics in the American South. She is the author of Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching. She is currently writing a book about rape and the American Civil War.

Roderick Ferguson

Email:

Roderick.Ferguson@yale.edu

Roderick A. Ferguson is the William Robertson Coe Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and American Studies at Yale University. He is the author of One-Dimensional Queer (Polity, 2019), We Demand: The University and Student Protests (University of California, 2017), The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (University of Minnesota, 2012), and Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (University of Minnesota, 2004). He is the co-editor with Grace Hong of the anthology Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization (Duke University, 2011). He is also co-editor with Erica Edwards and Jeffrey Ogbar of Keywords of African American Studies (NYU, 2018). He is the 2020 recipient of the Kessler Award from the Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS).

Joseph Fischel

Email:

joseph.fischel@yale.edu

Joe Fischel is an Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies. A theorist of social and sexual justice, he is the author of Sex and Harm in the Age of Consent and Screw Consent: A Better Politics of Sexual Justice, as well as co-editor of the forthcoming volume Enticements: Queer Legal Studies. He has published several articles on the regulation of sex, gender and sexuality in academic journals and for popular audience. Fischel’s current book project, Sodomitical Justice: A Solicitation investigates the life and afterlife of sodomy law in Louisiana to advance a “paraidentitarian” case for sexual freedom

Scott Herring

Email:

scott.herring@yale.edu

Scott Herring is Professor of American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. His primary research focuses on the overlap between LGBTQ studies and modern U.S. literary and cultural studies, with particular interest in critical rural/regional studies, critical age studies, and material culture studies. He is the author and editor of several books including Aging Moderns: Art, Literature, and the Experiment of Later Life, The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture, and Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism.

Caleb Knapp

Email:

caleb.knapp@yale.edu

Caleb Knapp is a Lecturer in the Department of History at Yale University. He works on American literature and culture, gender and sexuality, and histories of slavery and abolition. He is completing a book that examines how nineteenth-century debates over racial slavery shaped the development of modern sexual knowledges in the United States. His research has been supported by the American Studies Association, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Mellon Foundation, and more. His essay on same-sex sexual violence under slavery, “Much-Abused Luke,” has recently been published in History of the Present.

Regina Kunzel

Co-Director

Regina Kunzel is the Larned Professor of History and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Kunzel is the author of Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality, Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890 to 1945, and articles on queer history, trans studies, disability studies, and the history of incarceration. Her current project explores the encounter of queer and gender-variant people with psychiatry in the twentieth-century United States.

Greta LaFleur

Email:

greta.lafleur@yale.edu

Greta LaFleur is Assistant Professor of American Studies. Her research and teaching focus on eighteenth-century North American literary and cultural studies, the history of science, the history and historiography of sexuality, and queer studies. She is currently completing a book that brings together the history of sexuality and early environmental studies in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.

Kathryn Lofton

Email:

kathryn.lofton@yale.edu

Kathryn Lofton is Professor of American Studies, Religious Studies, and History. A historian of religion, she has written on late nineteenth-century evangelicalism, early twentieth-century modernism, the history of religious studies, transnational celebrity, and the relationship between religion and consumerism. She received the 2006-2007 LGBT Religious History Award for her essay, “Queering Fundamentalism: John Balcom Shaw and the Sexuality of a Protestant Orthodoxy,” Journal of the History of Sexuality (2008). Her essay, “ ‘Everything Queer?” will conclude a forthcoming collection, Queer Christianities: Lived Religion in Transgressive Forms, edited by Kathleen Talvacchia, Mark Larrimore, and Michael Pettinger. During her time at Yale, she has served as chair of the LGBT Studies committee as well as the Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program.

Mary Lui

Email:

mary.lui@yale.edu

Mary Lui is Professor of American Studies and History. Her primary research interests include: Asian American history, urban history, women and gender studies, and public history. She is the author of The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century New York City (Princeton University Press, 2005), the 2007 co-winner of the best book prize for history from the Association of Asian American Studies. The book uses a 1909 unsolved murder case to examine race, gender, and interracial sexual relations in the cultural, social and spatial formation of New York City Chinatown from 1870-1920. She is currently working on a new book titled, Making Model Minorities: Asian Americans, Race, and Citizenship in Cold War America at Home and Abroad, that examines the history of Asian American and U.S. cultural diplomacy in Asia in the early years of the Cold War.

Joanne Meyerowitz

Email:

joanne.meyerowitz@yale.edu

Co-Director

Joanne Meyerowitz is Arthur Unobskey Professor of History and American Studies. She has written on the history of gender and sexuality in the twentieth-century U.S. Her books include How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States and A War on Global Poverty: The Lost Promise of Redistribution and the Rise of Microcredit. Her articles on gender and sexuality have appeared in the American Historical Review, Gender and History, GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, Journal of American History, Journal of Women’s History, and other publications.

Evren Savci

Email:

evren.savci@yale.edu

Evren Savcı is Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Her research focuses on language, knowledge, sexual politics, neoliberalism, religion and modernity. Her first book, Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal Islam (2021, DUP) analyzes sexual politics under contemporary Turkey’s AKP regime with an eye to the travel and translation of sexual political vocabulary. Savcı’s second book project turns to the political economy of monogamy and its establishment as a central tenet of civilized sexual morality.