Claire Bond Potter is Professor of History and American Studies at Wesleyan University, Middletown Connecticut.

I specialize in United States political history, queer studies, and the history of gender, sex and feminism. I am the author of  War on Crime: Bandits, G-Men and the Politics of Mass Culture (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998.) My article, “Queer Hoover: Sex, Lies and Political History,” published in the Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 15 no. 3 (September 2006) was awarded the 2007-08 Audre Lorde article prize by the Committee on Lesbian and Gay History (American Historical Association affiliate society.)  You can access some of my work here.

At present, I am working on a book about feminist and federal anti-pornography campaigns in the late twentieth century United States, Sex in Public: Feminism, the Reagan Revolution and the Politics of Pornography, 1968-1990.

With Renee Romano of the Oberlin College Department of History, I am co-editor of a monograph series in United States history, “Since 1970: Histories of Contemporary America,” to be published by the University of Georgia Press (Derek Krissof, acquisitions editor.) The series will be inaugurated with a co-edited collection of articles on the challenges attendant to, and the development of new methods for, writing the history of the recent past. Doing Recent History: On Privacy, Copyright, Video Games, Institutional Review Boards, Activist Scholarship and History That Talks Back is forthcoming in spring, 2012.  Click here to view information about the series, as well as information about how to submit a book proposal.

I can also be found at my blog Tenured Radical and at the group history blog Cliopatria.

I supervise student research in the fields of United States political and cultural history; queer studies and the history of sexuality; the history of race in the United States, and the history of feminism and gender.

In calendar year 2012, I will be a Visiting Professor of History at the New School for Public Engagement, New York City.