Faculty Affiliated with LGBTS

* = Member of the 2009-10 LGBTS Committee

Jafari Sinclaire Allen* (Ph.D., Columbia University, 2003) is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and African American Studies. He works at the intersections of queer sexuality, gender and blackness in Cuba, the US, and transnationally; and he teaches courses on Black feminist and queer theory, critical cultural studies, ethnographic methodology and writing, Cuba and the Caribbean, and subjectivity, consciousness and resistance. His critical ethnography, ¡Venceremos? Sexuality, Gender and Black Self-Making in Cuba, is forthcoming in Fall 2009 from the Perverse Modernities series of Duke University Press. His current research project, Once Removed: Queer Alter-natives and the redemption of a transnational Black counter-public, traces the work of Black transgender, lesbian, bisexual, gay, and same-gender loving artists, activists, organic intellectuals, and everyday people, that, continuing in the insurgent Black intellectual tradition, produce trenchant critique of violence, silence, invisibility, and forgetting "at home" throughout the Americas and create forms of politics and expressive practices which resist oppressive structures of the state and global capital.

Emily Bakemeier* is Deputy Provost of the University. She graduated from Dartmouth College and received an M.F.A. and Ph.D. in Art History from Princeton University. Her area of expertise is in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century northern European art, particularly Dutch and Flemish painting, northern European architectural history, including landscape and garden architecture, and French royal portraiture and iconography.

George Chauncey* is Professor of History and American Studies and chair of LGBT Studies. He is the author of Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (1994) and Why Marriage? The History Shaping Today's Debate over Gay Equality (2004), and the co-editor of Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (1989) and of a special issue of GLQ: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies on "Thinking Sexuality Transnationally" (1999). His most recent article, in which he reflects on his involvement as a professional historian in ten gay rights legal cases, is "How History Mattered: Sodomy Law and Marriage Reform in the United States," Public Culture (2008). He is currently completing a book on The Strange Career of the Closet: Gay Culture, Consciousness, and Politics from the Second World War to the Gay Liberation Era. He regularly teaches a fall lecture course and a spring junior seminar on LGBT history as well as graduate courses on the history of sexuality. With Joanne Meyerowitz, he is co-director of the Yale Research Initiative on the History of Sexualities.

Siobhán Garrigan is a theologian, teacher and artist. She currently serves as Associate Professor of Liturgical Studies and Associate Dean at the Institute of Sacred Music. Her research connects theology, ritual practices and social justice. She is about to publish "Queer Worship" in Theology and Sexuality and The Real Peace Process: Worship, Politics and the End of Sectarianism, an analysis of religious practices in Ireland and Northern Ireland. She directs the ecumenical daily worship program at Yale Divinity School, and is a faculty mentor to the YDS LGBTQ Coalition.

Joseph W. Gordon* is the Dean of Undergraduate Education in Yale College. He is responsible for academic planning and review, including the procedures by which programs and courses are added to the curriculum. He has taught courses in 19th- and 20th-century British literature at Yale since 1976. He earned a bachelor's degree from Amherst College and the Ph.D. in English from Yale. From 2000-2003, he served as the national president of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, America's oldest undergraduate honor society, and continues to serve on its national Executive Committee. He has a passion for all things Spanish (except jamón), operatic, or canine.

Ron Gregg* is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies and Director of Film Programming at the Whitney Humanities Center. He teaches courses on queer cinema (both Hollywood and avant-garde) and has published articles on topics ranging from MGM's management of the image of its 1920s gay star William Haines to queer representation in the competing videos produced during Oregon's 1992 anti-gay rights ballot measure campaign. He regularly brings filmmakers to campus, including Jonathan Caouette, Barbara Hammer, José Rodriquez-Soltero, Jim Hubbard, and Cecilia Doughtery, and he chairs the FLAGS Film Committee, which selects films to be purchased for the Film Studies Center. This year he is co-organizing a conference on Postwar Queer Underground Cinema, 1950-1968, which will take place February 19-20, 2009 at the Whitney Humanities Center. He has curated film and video programs for the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, the South African Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Chicago's Gerber-Hart Gay and Lesbian Library, and several universities.

Margaret Homans is Professor of English and of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She currently serves as Director of Graduate Studies for WGSS at Yale and as President of the International Society for the Study of Narrative. She has published widely on feminist and queer theory and on British and U.S. women writers. Her books include Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing (1986) and Royal Representations: Queen Victoria and British Culture, 1837-1876 (1998), and she is the editor of Virginia Woolf: A Collection of Critical Essays (1993). Her essays include “Amy Lowell’s Keats: Reading Straight, Writing Lesbian” and “‘Racial Composition:’ Metaphor and the Body in the Writing of Race.” She teaches courses on Virginia Woolf, feminist literary criticism, and the intellectual history of feminist and queer theory. Her current project is a book on adoption that investigates how adoption asks questions about normative ideas of family and identity; she also teaches a course on adoption narratives.

Marianne LaFrance is Professor of Psychology and of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and served as Chair of LGS Studies at Yale from 2000-2007.  As a research psychologist she studies how gender is behaviorally acquired and "performed" (e.g., via facial expression, body movement, vocalization); how gender and sexuality are understood by lay people as immutable essences or fluid responses and how these construals affect attitudes and support for social policy; and the consequences of subtle sexual harassment. She has published extensively in scientific journals and her forthcoming book is Lip Service: The Psychology Behind the Smile.  She teaches courses on The Psychology of Gender and Gender Images in the Media. She also runs a research lab for advanced undergraduates and graduate students called Gender Lab.  Her current research centers on examining the nature and effects of sexual objectification.

Kathryn Lofton* is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Religious Studies.  Her research focuses on the intersection of religious innovation, consumer culture, and the modern imaginary.  A specialist in nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. religious history, she has published on the evangelical preacher, theological modernism, civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, soap advertisements, and the religious meanings of Oprah Winfrey's multimedia empire.  Her first book, Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon, is forthcoming from the University of California Press.  She is currently working on her second monograph, The Modernity in Mr. Shaw: Modernisms and Fundamentalisms in American Culture, which examines the formation of sexual identity through the life of one Presbyterian fundamentalist, John Balcom Shaw (1860-1935), an editor of The Fundamentals who was remitted from the ministry following accusations of sodomy in 1918. At Yale, she teaches courses on modern American religion, religion and sexuality, religion and popular culture, and methods and theories for the study of religion.

Barry McCrea* is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, with a secondary appointment in English. He has a B.A. in French and Spanish from Trinity College Dublin, and a Ph.D. from Princeton (2004). He has recently finished a book manuscript entitled Family and the Modern Novel, with chapters on Dickens, Conan Doyle, Joyce, and Proust, which links the evolution of modernist narrative form in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to a changing, non-genealogical conception of the family. He is the author of a number of articles on family and queerness in modern narrative. At Yale he teaches courses on modern European and Latin American literature in English, French, Italian, Spanish and Irish (Gaelic). His novel, The First Verse, won the 2005 Ferro-Grumley prize for gay fiction, was selected for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers program, and was nominated for an American Library Association Stonewall award and for a Lambda award. It was published in Spanish as Literati and in German as Die Poeten der Nacht.

Joanne Meyerowitz* is professor of History and American Studies. She has published widely in the history of gender and sexuality. Her book How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (2002) won the Stonewall Book Award of the American Library Association and the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award for GLBT nonfiction. She is also the author of Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880-1930 (1988) and the editor of Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960 (1994). Her current project examines theories of human difference in mid-twentieth-century social thought. Before she came to Yale in 2004, she taught at Indiana University and the University of Cincinnati and also edited the Journal of American History. With George Chauncey, she co-directs the Yale Research Initiative on the History of Sexualities.

Karen Nakamura,* a cultural and visual anthropologist whose research focuses on disability and minority social movements as well as gender and sexuality in contemporary Japan, is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and East Asian Studies. Her ethnography Deaf in Japan: Signing and the Politics of Identity (2006) won the John Whitney Hall Book Prize from the Association of Asian Studies. Her articles include "Female masculinity and fantasy spaces: transcending genders in the Takarazuka theatre" (co-authored with Hisako Matsuo) in Men and Masculinities in Contemporary Japan: Dislocating the Salaryman Doxa, ed. James Roberson and Nobue Suzuki. Recently she has been engaged in a new comparative project on disability politics in the United States and Japan. She has served on the editorial board of the American Anthropologist and is soon finishing a three-year term as an elected member of the AAA Minority Issues in Anthropology Commission. Her courses include "Queer Ethnographies" and "Minorities and Sexualities in Modern Japan."

Sally M. Promey* is Chair of the Program in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Professor of American Studies, and Deputy Director and Professor of Religion and Visual Culture, Yale Institute of Sacred Music. She holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Religious Studies. She directs the Yale Initiative for the Study of Religion and Visual Culture, and she is also one of three principal investigators for the Women, Religion, and Globalization Project. Her scholarship explores visual and material cultures of religions in the United States. She is author of two award-winning books, Painting Religion in Public: John Singer Sargent's "Triumph of Religion" at the Boston Public Library (1999) and Spiritual Spectacles: Vision and Image in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Shakerism (1993), as well as contributing author and co-editor of The Visual Culture of American Religions (2001). Her current research interests include the public display of religion in the United States from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first, American religious liberalism, and visual controversy and censorship, especially as elicited in relation to religion, sexuality, and the politics of vision.

Graeme Reid,* an anthropologist from South Africa, is Lecturer in LGBT Studies and Anthropology. Before coming to Yale, he received his Ph.D. at the University of Amsterdam and worked as a sexuality researcher at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) in Johannesburg. He is the co-author of Waiting to Happen: HIV/AIDS in Southern Africa and the co-editor of three books, Refiguring the Archive, Sex and Politics in South Africa, and Men Behaving Differently. He co-directed a documentary on South African gay hairstylists working in small towns entitled Dark and Lovely, Soft and Free. His book, Above the Skyline: Reverend Tsietsi Thandekiso and the Founding of an African Gay church, is currently in press. This fall he is co-teaching "Introduction to LGBT Studies;" he also teaches courses on HIV and AIDS in Africa, fashion and beauty, and theoretical approaches to research in gender and sexuality.

Sam See* is Assistant Professor of English and works primarily on British and American modernist literature and sexuality studies, although he also studies transatlantic literature from the late nineteenth century through the present. His first book project explores how British and American modernist writers co-opted the evolutionary precepts of degeneration theory to depict queer feeling as natural: material but nonetheless subject to change. His next book project will examine how British and American writers throughout the twentieth century used aesthetics like the mythical method and magic realism to create queer mythologies that depict the construction of transhistorical and transnational queer communities. These projects, and the essays that he has published on queer literature, reflect his abiding interest in the questions that aesthetic and sexual feeling present for literary historiography. At Yale, he teaches courses in twentieth-century British and American literature and sexuality studies, with particular emphases on the relationships between these fields and science, visual art, and aesthetic theory.

Timothy Stewart-Winter* is Lecturer in LGBTS and History.  He earned his Ph.D. in United States History in 2009 from the University of Chicago, where he received the ACLS/Mellon Dissertation Completion Fellowship and the James C. Hormel Fellowship in Lesbian and Gay Studies. His dissertation, "Raids, Rights, and Rainbow Coalitions: Sexuality and Race in Chicago Politics, 1950-2000," examined gay political mobilization and incorporation as well as the sources of black and gay coalition politics in the context of urban regime change and the "long" civil rights movement. His article "Not a Soldier, Not a Slacker: Conscientious Objectors and Male Citizenship in the United States during the Second World War" appeared in Gender & History (November 2007); "Picturing Same-Sex Marriage in the Antebellum United States: The Union of 'Two Most Excellent Men' in Longstreet's 'A Sage Conversation,'" coauthored with Simon Stern, is forthcoming in the Journal of the History of Sexuality. He begins teaching at Yale this fall with "Race and Sexual Politics in Modern America" and "Introduction to LGBT Studies."

Emilie M. Townes is the Associate Dean of Academic Affairs and Andrew W. Mellon Professor of African American Studies and Religion in the Divinity School.  She has appointments in African American Studies, Religious Studies, and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.  Her teaching and general research interests focus on social ethics, womanist ethics, critical social theory, cultural theory and studies, as well as on postmodernism and social postmodernism. Her specific interests include health and health care, the cultural production of evil, and developing a network between African Americans and Afro-Brasilian religious and secular leaders and community-based organizations. She is the first Black woman to serve as president of the American Academy of Religion (2008) and was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009.

John Treat is a professor of modern Japanese and Korean literary and cultural studies and chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures. He has also taught at the University of Washington, Berkeley, Stanford, Texas, and Seoul National.  He is the author of, among other books, Great Mirrors Shattered: Japan, Orientalism, and Homosexuality (Oxford UP, 1999). 

Maria Trumpler* is Senior Lecturer in Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies. She teaches a freshman seminar on the history of sexuality and a lecture course on women, food and culture. She is also the Director of the Office of LGBTQ Resources. She received her PhD in History of Medicine and Life Science from Yale in 1991.

Ludger Viefhues-Bailey is associate professor for Methods and Theory in the Study of Religion in the Department of Religious Studies.  He currently serves as co-chair of the philosophy of religion section of the American Academy of Religion.  His interest in the connection between sexual and epistemological practices led him to write Beyond the Philosopher’s Fear: A Cavellian Reading of Gender, Origin, and Religion in Modern Skepticism (Ashgate 2007). He is also interested in tracing how religious, sexual, and political normativities emerge together in modern secular nation states, which led him to write Between a Man and a Woman? Making Sense of Conservative Christian Opposition to Same-Sex Love (in press, Columbia University Press). Currently, he is working on a book entitled “No Separation. How Religion Makes the Secular Nation State.”

Michael Warner* is Seymour H. Knox Professor of English and American Studies and Chair of the Department of English, with diverse interests in colonial and antebellum America, social theory, media studies, queer theory and politics. He is currently at work on a study of secularism, including the theoretical understanding of secularism in the present, a historical inquiry into the development of secularism in America, and reflection on the relations between sexuality and secularity. With Craig Calhoun and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, he is coediting a volume titled Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age. Among his other books are The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (1990); Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory (1993); The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (1999); American Sermons (1999); Publics and Counterpublics (2002); The Portable Walt Whitman (2003); and with Myra Jehlen, The English Literatures of America, 1500-1800 (1997).

Timothy Young* is Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library focusing on fields of research related to modern literary and cultural movements, especially the avant garde, and visual culture. He currently is working to expand the library's collections in GLBTQ literature and culture as well as the broader field of human sexuality, with collections of manuscripts and books ranging from life histories, magazines, and erotica to Tijuana bibles. Other fields that he oversees include: financial history, comics and illustration, playing cards and games, sporting history and children's literature. He is the author of Drawn to Enchant: Original Children's Book Art in the Betsy Beinecke Shirley collection (2007) and My Heart in Company: The work of J.M. Barrie and the birth of Peter (2005). He holds a degree in English and French literature from the University of Tulsa and one in Library Science from the University of Texas at Austin.