Bio: Greta LaFleur, an associate professor of American Studies at Yale University, has been awarded a mid-career research fellowship at The Baldy Center for Fall 2023. LaFleur’s research and teaching focus on eighteenth-century North America, with special emphasis on the histories of science, the histories of race, the history and historiography of sexuality, and queer & trans studies. Author of The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018). LaFleur's fellowship at The Baldy Center will be dedicated to working on a second scholarly monograph, tentatively titled How Sex Became Good: The Feminist Movements and Racial Politics that Made Modern Sexuality (under contract with The University of Chicago Press). The work tracks how cultural and legal responses to the problem of sexual violence shaped the politicization of sexuality in the modern period.  

LaFleur is also the editor of: a special issue of American Quarterly, “Origins of Biopolitics in the Americas”  (2019, with Kyla Schuller); a special issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly on “Trans Exclusionary Feminisms and the Global New Right” (2022, with Serena Bassi); and, a special issue of GLQ on “The Science of Sex Itself” (2023, with Benjamin Kahan).  

LaFleur’s research has been supported by several fellowships, including those at: the Institute for Advanced Study (School of Social Sciences); the American Council of Learned Societies; the Massachusetts Historical Society; the William Andrews Clark Library at UCLA; the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University; The Clement Library at The University of Michigan; the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, MA; and, The Newberry Library in Chicago. LaFleur holds a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and a JD from The University of Connecticut.

SPECIAL EVENT, DECEMBER 1, 2023
Greta LaFleur, The Baldy Center Mid-Career Fellow
"Sex Panics and Risk Metrics: Law, Propensity, and the History of Sexuality"
Paper available in advance if the event.
Friday, Noon, 509 O'Brian Hall
Attend in-person or via Zoom.