Books in Progress
The Laws of Life
Sexual Science and Social Reform in the Nineteenth-Century United States
My book manuscript asks who made medical knowledge about sex and heredity before American medicine professionalized. Between the 1820s and 1880s, abolitionists, women’s rights activists, and utopian socialists, alongside hydropaths, eclectics, and other irregular physicians, were central producers of medical knowledge about sex and reproduction. In dozens of books selling hundreds of thousands of copies, on the lecture circuit, and in their own periodicals, they popularized universal “laws” of heredity and sexual health, campaigned for marriage restrictions and the censorship of the mails, promised to breed “a race of geniuses” and eradicate the “unfit,” and founded some of the nation’s first eugenics organizations. Blaming everything from tuberculosis and cancer to androgyny and same-sex desire on sexual excess, they made health a measure of racial and sexual fitness.
The book relocates the origins of eugenics from Francis Galton’s Britain and the Progressive Era to antebellum American reform. It shows that a popular, reform-driven sexual science preceded and shaped clinical sexology, moving irregular medicine and the women who led it from the margins to the center of the history of medicine. And drawing on disability and trans studies, it shows that before statistics defined the “normal” body, reformers had already made sexual and gender conformity a measure of health and fitness to reproduce.
Book manuscript in progress
Rethinking Sex
Polymorphous Perversity and the Fight Against Fascism
My second book follows these sciences into the twentieth century. Drawing on research in English, German, and French, it traces a transatlantic tradition of sexologists, psychoanalysts, feminists, and queer activists who argued that redefining sex was central to the fight against fascism, and it speaks to present-day struggles over the politics of health, from anti-trans legislation to the wellness politics of the contemporary right.
Second book project
Articles and chapters
“Settler Socialism in the Nineteenth-Century United States.” Settler Colonial Studies (2026).
“Mutual Aid, Technology, and the Problem of History,” with Tyesha Maddox and Robert Soden. In COVID Studies: New Directions in Social Science Disaster Research, edited by Scott Knowles. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023.
“Ernest Crosby,” “Walt Whitman,” “New Thought,” and “Free Thought.” In The Encyclopedia of the American Left, edited by Paul Buhle and Mari Jo Buhle. Oxford University Press, 2024.
