Joanne Meyerowitz

Joanne Meyerowitz earned her bachelor’s degree at the University of Chicago and her M.A. and Ph.D. at Stanford University.  She is currently Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University, where she teaches courses on the history of women, gender, and sexuality, and codirects the Yale Research Initiative on the History of Sexualities.  She is the author of How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States and Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880-1930 and the editor of History and September 11th and Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960.  Before she moved to Yale, she taught at Indiana University and the University of Cincinnati.  From 1999 to 2004, she served as editor of the Journal of American History.  In addition to her Guggenheim Fellowship, she has held fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Humanities Center, and the Social Science Research Council.  Her current project examines mid-twentieth-century social constructionist theories of human difference.  It focuses on "culture and personality" theorists and their popularizers, and how they shaped law, policy, education, and social movements.