George A. 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.