George Chauncey
Professor
Office: HGS 2684
Phone: (203) 436-8100
Email: george.chauncey@yale.edu
George Chauncey joined the department in the fall of 2006 as professor in the fields of twentieth-century US history and lesbian and gay history. He received his doctorate in history from Yale in 1989 and then taught for fifteen years at the University of Chicago, as well as for shorter stints at Rutgers, New York University, and the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He is the co-director of the Yale Research Initiative on the History of Sexualities
Professor Chauncey is best known for his book Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (Basic, 1994), which won the Organization of American Historians' Merle Curti Prize for the best book in social history and Frederick Jackson Turner Prize for the best first book in history, as well as the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and Lambda Literary Award. He has also published Why Marriage? The History Shaping Today's Debate over Gay Equality (Basic, 2004) and co-edited three books and special journal issues. He is currently completing another book, The Strange Career of the Closet: Gay Culture, Consciousness, and Politics from the Second World War to the Gay Liberation Era.
Since 1993, George Chauncey has participated as a historian in a dozen gay rights cases, including Lawrence v. Texas (2003), for which he organized and was lead author of the Historians' Amicus Brief, and Romer v. Evans (1996) and Perry v. Schwarzenegger (the on-going challenge to California’s Proposition 8), in which he testified at trial as an expert witness on the history of antigay discrimination. He has also served as the historical consultant to numerous public history projects, including the 1994 Becoming Visible/Stonewall 25 exhibition at the New York Public Library, the Out at CHM lecture series which began in 2003 at the Chicago Historical Museum, and several documentary films. He is the recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.
