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Speakers): Laurie Marhoefer

Among its many other crimes, the Nazi State carried out modern history’s most deadly persecution of men accused of having sex with men. Until the 1980s, little was known about the anti-homosexuality campaign. Since then, there has been an explosion of scholarship. Yet there are key unanswered questions. Recently, a wide-ranging, heated public debate among historians about the nature of the campaign has broken out. It even got the attention of mainstream German media. This talk draws on new research on the anti-homosexuality campaign as well as on queer theory and trans studies to pose some new answers to old questions. 
 
Laurie Marhoefer is assistant professor of History at the University of Washington. She is a historian of Weimar and Nazi Germany (1918-45) and studies politics. Her first book,  (2015), is on the rise of the Nazis and the politics of sex and gender in Germany before 1933. It also re-examines the gay and trans rights movement of the 1920s, which was the world's first. Laurie’s work has been published in The American Historical Review, German Studies Review, and elsewhere. She also occasionally writes commentary on contemporary American politics from the perspective of German history. Her  essays have been published on Salon.com, Newsweek.com, and elsewhere, and quoted in The Washington Post. She is currently at work on a number of projects, including one on queer sexuality and transgender and the Nazi State, one on blackness and citizenship in Germany in the 1920s, and a third on the transnational history of gay politics.