Scholar’s Profile

Basic Info

Field: History: LGBT in USSR and contemporary Russia; Homophobia; Gulag sexuality; Soviet & Russian medicine, psychiatry, forensic medicine

Short Bio: I am Professor of Modern Russian History at the University of Oxford, jointly appointed by the Faculty of History and the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies. As a young gay activist in the 1970s in Canada, I came of age when knowledge about queer history and culture was scarce and hard to find: I am proud to be part of a generation that uncovered “hidden histories” and reconceptualised the queer past, while striving for a better queer future.

I am interested in the history of sexualities and gender in modernising Russia, and particularly the role of medicine and law in shaping the regulation of sexual and gender dissent and conformity.

Recent/Major Publications: Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.

Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent, Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2001, translated into Russian and published in Moscow by Ladomir Press in 2008; and Spanish, published in Buenos Aires 2018.

Bolshevik Sexual Forensics: Diagnosing Disorder in the Clinic and Courtroom, 1917-1939 (DeKalb, Il.: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009).

“Love and Death: Transforming Sexualities in Russia, 1914-1922,” Cultural History of Russia in the Great War and Revolution, 1914–22, Book 2: Political Culture, Identities, Mentalities, and Memories. Murray Frame, Boris Kolonitskii, Steven G. Marks, and Melissa K. Stockdale, eds. (Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers, 2014).

“The sexual revolution in the USSR: dynamic change beneath the ice”, in Sexual Revolutions, ed. G. Hekma and A. Giami (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014).