Faculty
Director
George Chauncey
George Chauncey, the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History, writes and teaches about the history of sexuality, gender, and the city, with a focus on US LGBTQ history. He is the author of Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 and Why Marriage? The History Shaping Today's Debate over Gay Equality, and the co-editor of Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past. He is currently nearing completion of a book on the history of gay male culture, politics, and everyday life in the segregated neighborhoods of postwar New York City. He received his doctorate in history from Yale and then taught at the University of Chicago and Yale before joining the Columbia faculty in 2017. While at Chicago, he founded and directed the Lesbian and Gay Studies Project of the Center for Gender Studies and co-chaired a year-long Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Sexual Identities and Identity Politics in Transnational Perspective, which resulted in a 1999 special issue of GLQ: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies on “Thinking Sexuality Transnationally.” He also chaired The Future of the Queer Past, a four-day transnational history conference held in September 2000 that drew 200 historians to Chicago from a dozen countries to present their work on some fifty panels. At Yale he served as chair of the History Department and the LGBT Studies Committee and co-founded and co-directed the Yale Research Initiative on the History of Sexualities. Since 1993, he has participated as an expert witness in more than thirty gay rights cases, including Romer v. Evans (1996), Lawrence v. Texas (2003), and the marriage equality cases decided by the Supreme Court in 2013 and 2015. In 2022, the Library of Congress awarded him the John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity.
Affiliated Faculty
Denise Cruz
Denise Cruz is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and a scholar of gender and sexuality in national and transnational cultures. The subjects she studies are varied: from the connections between the rise of English literature and the women’s suffrage movement in the Philippines; to the vibrant high fashion world of contemporary Manila; to the artistic strategies modernist authors used to imagine a transpacific world during the early twentieth century. Her research documents, historicizes, and explores national, regional, and global dynamics in North America, the Philippines, and Asia, and their effects on how we think about gender and sexuality. The author of Transpacific Femininities: the Making of the Modern Filipina (Duke UP, 2012) , she has also published essays in American Quarterly, PMLA, Modern Fiction Studies, American Literature, American Literary History, the Journal of Asian American Studies and in edited collections on Asian American culture, Philippine studies, and gender studies. She is currently working on two book projects: a study of fashion in Manila and its connections to the national and global (funded by a five-year Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council), and an analysis of regions and regionalisms in Asian America. You can find out more about these projects at www.denise-cruz.com.
Camille Robcis
Camille Robcis is Professor of French and History at Columbia University. Her first book, The Law of Kinship: Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and the Family in France (Cornell, 2013), examines how and why, during the 1990s, French legislators turned to some of the most difficult concepts of structuralist anthropology and psychoanalysis to reassert the foundational role of the heterosexual family in heated discussions around bioethics, same-sex unions, single-parent households, family names, surrogacy, and adoption. Her second book, Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in France traces the history of institutional psychotherapy, a movement born after WWII that advocated a radical restructuring of the asylum in an attempt to rethink and reform psychiatric care. She is currently working on a project that focuses on the recent protests against the “theory of gender,” especially in their conceptual link to populism. She received her B.A. in History and Modern Culture & Media from Brown University, her Ph.D. in History from Cornell.