Regina Kunzel

Regina Kunzel, the Larned Professor of History and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, is interested broadly in histories of gender and sexuality, carcerality, and the twined histories of sexual deviance and normalcy. Kunzel is the author of Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality (University of Chicago Press, 2008), Fallen Women, Problem Girls: Unmarried Mothers and the Professionalization of Social Work, 1890 to 1945 (Yale University Press, 1993), and articles on queer history, trans studies, disability studies, the history of prison sexual culture, and gender and professionalization. Kunzel’s forthcoming book, In the Shadow of Diagnosis: Psychiatric Power and Queer Life (University of Chicago Press, 2024), explores the encounter of LGBT/queer and gender-variant people with psychiatry in the twentieth-century U.S. Kunzel is the co-director of the Yale Research Initiative on the History of Sexualities.