Faculty Co-Directors

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 from which were published in 1999 as a special issue of GLQ: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, which he co-edited with Elizabeth Povinelli).  Working with three of his graduate students, he also organized The Future of the Queer Past, a four-day transnational history conference held at the University of Chicago in September 2000 that drew together 200 historians from a dozen countries to present their work on some fifty panels.  He was the organizer and lead author of the Historians' Amicus Brief in Lawrence v. Texas (2003), which the Supreme Court cited in its landmark decision overturning the nation's remaining sodomy laws, and he has participated as an expert witness on the history of marriage or antigay discrimination in several other gay rights cases.  

Joanne Meyerowitz, Professor of History and American Studies, earned her doctorate at Stanford University.  She is the author of Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880-1930 (University of Chicago Press, 1988) and How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (Harvard University Press, 2002), the editor of Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960 (1994) and History and September 11th (2003), and the co-editor (with Gail Hershatter) of “Sexing Women’s History,” a special issue of the Journal of Women’s History.  Before joining the faculty at Yale, she taught at the University of Cincinnati and Indiana University, and edited the Journal of American 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” to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Kinsey’s volume on women.  Her articles have appeared in the Journal of American History, Journal of Women’s History, Gender and History, GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, and other scholarly publications.  Her current project examines theories of human difference in mid-twentieth-century social thought.  In recent months she presented portions of it as the Mary Whiton Calkins lecture of the American Psychological Association and the Ida Cordelia Beam Distinguished Visiting Professorship at the University of Iowa.