Joanne Meyerowitz
Joanne Meyerowitz received her B.A. from the University of Chicago and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Stanford University. Before joining the faculty at Yale in 2004, she taught at the University of Cincinnati and Indiana University, and for five years edited the Journal of American History, the leading scholarly journal in U.S. history.
Her most recent book, A War on Global Poverty: The Lost Promise of Redistribution and the Rise of Microcredit (Princeton University Press, 2021), won the Myrna Bernath Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. A history of U.S. involvement in campaigns to end global poverty in the 1970s and 1980s, it shows how and why anti-poverty efforts increasingly focused on women as the deserving poor.
She is also the author of How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States, which won the Israel Fishman (Stonewall) Award from the American Library Association and ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year Award for Non-Fiction GLBT, and Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880-1930. She’s the editor of History and September 11th and Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960. Her public writing has appeared in, among others, the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Politico, Public Seminar, Time, and Washington Post.
Meyerowitz is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Society of American Historians, and a past president of the Organization of American Historians. She has won fellowships from, among others, the American Council of Learned Societies, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, National Humanities Center, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and Social Science Research Council. At the University of Cincinnati, she won the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching, and at Yale, she won the Graduate Mentor Award in the Humanities.
At Yale, she has served as chair of LGBT Studies, chair of American Studies, and acting chair of the Department of History. She is currently co-director of the Yale Research Initiative on the History of Sexualities.
A few articles:
- “Radical Feminists, the Long ‘Sex Wars,’ and the Anti-Gender Movement: The Career of Janice Raymond,” Gender and History (online early view, January 2026; forthcoming in print journal)
- “September 11th Revisited: The Troubled History of Victim Compensation,” Modern American History (July 2023)
- “How the War on Global Poverty Failed,” Public Seminar, August 26, 2021
- “180 Op-Eds: Or How to Make the Present Historical,” Journal of American History 107:2 (September 2020)
- “The Liberal 1950s? Reinterpreting Postwar U.S. Sexual Culture,” in Karen Hagemann and Sonya Michel, eds., Gender and the Long Postwar: Reconsiderations of the United States and the Two Germanys, 1945-1989 (Johns Hopkins University Press and Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2014), 297-319
- “‘How Common Culture Shapes the Separate Lives’: Sexuality, Race, and Mid-Twentieth-Century Social Constructionist Thought,” Journal of American History 96:4 (March 2010), 1057-1084
- “Transnational Sex and U.S. History,” American Historical Review 114:5 (December 2009), 1273-1286
- “A History of ‘Gender,’” American Historical Review 113:5 (December, 2008), 1346-1356
