Princeton University

Margot Canaday is a legal and political historian who studies gender and sexuality in modern America. She holds a B.A. from the University of Iowa and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. Canaday joined the History Department in 2008 after a three year term in the Princeton Society of Fellows. Her first book, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth Century America, was published in 2009 by Princeton University Press. It examines military, immigration, and welfare policy to ask how homosexuality came to be a meaningful category for the federal state over the early- to mid-twentieth century. The dissertation on which the book is based won the Lerner-Scott prize from the Organization of American Historians (OAH), as well as prizes from the Law and Society Association, and the University of Minnesota. She was also the recipient of the Louis Pelzer Memorial Award from the OAH. Canaday’s work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the OAH, the American Historical Association, the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military, and twice by the Social Science Research Council. Her new book project is a queer history of the American workplace from the mid-nineteenth century to the present that integrates labor, business, legal, and women’s history with the history of sexuality.

Professor Canaday’s teaching interests include gender and women’s history, the history of sexuality, as well as American political and legal history. While at Princeton, she has taught undergraduate seminars on the history of the American state, on gender and work, as well as a graduate seminar on the history of sexuality. Beginning in the spring of 2009, she will regularly offer an undergraduate lecture course on the history of gender and sexuality in modern America.

“Heterosexuality as a Legal Regime,” in Michael Grossberg and Christopher Tomlins, eds., The Cambridge History of Law in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

“Building a Straight State: Sexuality and Social Citizenship under the 1944 G.I. Bill,” The Journal of American History 90 (December 2003).

“Thinking Sex in the Transnational Turn: An Introduction,” (Introductory essay for a forum on transnational histories of sexuality, commissioned by the American Historical Review).

Perverse Ambitions, Deviant Careers: A Queer History of the American Workplace, 1850-2000 (Book manuscript in the planning stages).