Laurie Marhoefer is a historian of queer and trans politics. Marhoefer's book on fascism and the politics of sex is Sex and the Weimar Republic: German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis (2015); it reexamines the gay and trans rights movements of the 1920s, which were the world's first (you can hear them talk about it here). Her work has been published in The American Historical Review and elsewhere. She also writes for the press on things like neo-Nazism, queer fascism, and the history of AIDS.
Research/Teaching Areas: 20th Century Germany, Empire and Colonialism, Fascism, Gender, Medicine, Queer Studies, Race and Ethnicity, Sexuality, Transgender Studies
Current Projects: Marhoefer has a book forthcoming in 2021 on the intersections of early queer politics and racism, empire, antisemitism, eugenics, and anti-colonialism, told through the story of the world journey of Li Shiu Tong and Magnus Hirschfeld. The other book-in-progress, tentatively Crimes Against Nature and Crimes Against Humanity, is a history of queer and/or transgender people in Nazi Germany and Austria and Nazi-occupied Europe that considers women as well as men and trans as well as cis people and centrally analyzes racism as a vector of persecution.
