Faculty Updates: Laurie Marhoefer 

Submitted by Michael Neininger on
Laurie Marhoefer

I am a historian of queer and trans politics. My book on fascism and the politics of sex is Sex and the Weimar Republic: German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis (2015); it reexamines the gay and trans rights movements of the 1920s, which were the world's first (you can hear me talk about it here). My work has been published in The American Historical Review and elsewhere. I also write for the press on things like neo-Nazism, queer fascism, and the history of AIDS.

I'm currently working on a book, tentatively Crimes Against Nature and Crimes Against Humanity, which is a history of queer and/or transgender people in Nazi Germany and Austria and Nazi-occupied Europe that considers women as well as men and trans as well as cis people and centrally analyzes racism as a vector of persecution. A third project on the intersections of queer politics and racism, empire, antisemitism, anti-colonialism, as told through the story of the world journey of Li Shiu Tong and Magnus Hirschfeld, is also in the works.

I co-teach a class on the global history of AIDS with Prof. Lynn M. Thomas and I'm developing a class on the digital histories of the First and Second World Wars with Taylor Soja, supported by a digital humanities grant from the Simpson Center.

I am affiliated with the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies and the Department of Germanics. Before UW I had gigs at the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto, the University of Oxford, and Syracuse University.

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