Regina Kunzel is Doris Stevens Professor in Women’s Studies and Professor of History at Princeton University. Professor Kunzel is an historian of gender and sexuality in the 20th-century United States, with interdisciplinary interests in American Studies and LGBTQ studies. Her research focuses on the twined histories of difference and normalcy, the regulatory force of carceral institutions, and relationships between expert discourses and the self-representations of historical subjects. Professor Kunzel’s most recent book, Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality (University of Chicago Press, 2008), examines the social and sexual world made by prisoners over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and tracks its meaning for the formation of modern sexuality. Professor Kunzel is currently working on a book exploring the encounter of sexual- and gender-variant people with psychiatry and psychoanalysis in the mid-twentieth-century U.S.

This event is a part of the “Mass Incarceration and the Carceral State” Series, an initiative supported by Humanities Writ Large. Co-sponsored by the Department of History, International Comparative Studies, the Program in Women’s Studies, the Franklin Humanities Institute, and the Duke Human Rights Center@FHI.