Regina Kunzel designated the Larned Professor

Kunzel is an historian of gender and sexuality in the 20th-century United States.
Regina Kunzel
Regina Kunzel

Regina Grace Kunzel, newly named as the Larned Professor of History and of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, is an historian of gender and sexuality in the 20th-century United States. Her appointment will be effective in January.

Kunzel is currently the Doris Stevens Chair and Professor of History and Gender and Sexuality Studies at Princeton University.

Kunzel’s 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.

Kunzel’s most recent book, “Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality,” examines the social and sexual world made by prisoners over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries and tracks its meaning for the formation of modern sexuality. The book was awarded the American Historical Association’s John Boswell Prize, the Modern Language Association’s Alan Bray Memorial Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award, and the Foundation for the Scientific Study of Sexuality Bonnie and Vern L. Bullough Award; it was a finalist for the American Studies Association’s John Hope Franklin Prize.

Kunzel is also the author of “Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890 to 1945.” She has served as co-editor of the journal Gender & History. She co-edits a book series on sexuality studies, and is currently working on a book exploring the encounter of sexual- and gender-variant people with psychiatry in the mid-20th-century United States.

A graduate of Stanford University, Kunzel earned her Ph.D. from Yale in 1990. Prior to joining the faculty at Princeton, Kunzel taught at the University of Minnesota, where she was the Paul R. Frenzel Chair in Liberal Arts and professor of history and gender, women, and sexuality studies, and at Williams College, as the Fairleigh Dickinson Jr. Professor of History.

Kunzel has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Stanford Humanities Center, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Social Science Research Council.

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