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Leigh Ann Wheeler
Associate Professor
Ph.D., University of Minnesota
United States, Women, Gender, Sexuality

Office: LT 717  
Phone: (607) 777-2631

e-mail: lwheeler@binghamton.edu
I recently accepted a job at Binghamton University because BU combines the best of what I have valued most in my professional career—excellent, student-oriented teaching and rigorous, high-quality scholarship. With others at BU, I consider teaching and scholarship to be mutually reinforcing activities. Preparing courses, delivering lectures, facilitating discussions, and interacting with students stimulates my thinking and my enthusiasm for history in ways that more solitary work cannot. The dynamic interplay among students and between myself and students, the clever questions and creative responses that make me think in new ways while demonstrating that my students are doing the same, the spontaneous retorts and thoughtful reflections, the moments of illumination when a student figures something out—all remind me how and why the work we do in and out of the classroom really matters.

My scholarly work revolves around one key problem—understanding the gendered and changing nature of sexual culture in the twentieth-century United States. “Making Liberties,” my current book project, stretches from 1920 through the early 1980s. It shows how, why, and with what results the American Civil Liberties Union brought sexuality into the realm of law and constitutional rights. Like my earlier work, “Making Liberties” employs an empathic approach, relating private lives to public activism as it explains ACLU leaders’ internal debates, evolving policies, changing strategies, and relationships with individuals and institutions outside the organization.

Recent or Current Undergraduate Courses:

  • United States Women, Gender, and Sexuality: Twentieth-Century
  • Early America: Thinking Critically About Values in History
  • Modern America: The United States Since 1865
  • Social Movements in the Twentieth Century United States
  • Women in the Modern United States
  • Research Seminars for History Majors:
    • Women and Social Movements in the Twentieth-Century U.S.
    • Civil Liberties in the U.S., 1920-2000
    • Gender and Reform in the United States
    • The American Past Through Movies

Recent or Current Graduate Courses:

  • Women and Social Movements in the Twentieth-Century U.S.
  • History of Media Censorship in the United States
  • The American Civil Liberties Union and Cultural Change in the U.S.
  • Problems in 20th-Century America
  • Social Movements in the Twentieth-Century United States
  • Women in the Modern United States

Selected Publications

  • Against Obscenity: Reform and the Politics of Womanhood in America, 1873-1935 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004; paperback edition, 2007).
  • “Some Origins of ‘Sexual Expression’: Women, Men, and the ACLU in Greenwich Village, 1920-1932,” in Tracy Thomas, ed., The New Face of Women’s Legal History (in preparation, proposal to be submitted to New York University Press)
  • “Publicizing Sex: How the American Civil Liberties Union Liberated Media, 1965-1973,” in Eric Schaefer, ed., Sex Scene: Media and the Sexual Revolution (forthcoming, Duke University Press)
  • “Rescuing Sex from Prudery and Prurience: American Women’s Use of Sex Education as an Antidote to Obscenity, 1925-1932,” Journal of Women’s History, 12 (Fall 2000), 173-195.
  • “Battling Over Burlesque: Conflicts Between Maternalism, Paternalism, and Organized Labor, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1920-1932,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 20 (Special Issue: Motherhood and Maternalism, Fall 1999), 148-174.
  • “From Reading Shakespeare to Reforming Burlesque: The Minneapolis Woman’s Club and the Women’s Welfare League, 1907-1920,” Michigan Historical Review, 25 (Spring 1999), 44-75.


Selected Grants and Fellowships

  • University of Texas at Austin, Harry Ransom Center Woodward/Bernste Fellowship, 2007-2008
  • Princeton University Library Research Grant, 2007-2008
  • Smith College, Margaret Storrs Grierson Travel-to-Collection funds, 2006-2007
  • National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, 2006-2007
  • Institute for the Study of Culture and Society Fellowship, Bowling Green State University, Fall 2006
  • Research Incentive Grant, Bowling Green State University, 2005-2006
  • Jack B. Critchfield Research Grant, Rollins College, 1999-2000
  • National Security Education Program Fellowship, U.S. Departments of Defense and Education, 1996-1997
  • Dissertation Fellowship, University of Minnesota History Department, 1995
  • Center for Advanced Feminist Studies Travel Grants, University of Minnesota, 1996-1997
  • Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships, 1994-1995
  • Graduate Fellowship, University of Minnesota History Department, 1989-1990