Social Reform and the Orgasm in the Long Nineteenth Century traces a hundred-ear struggle among activists in the 1800s over the orgasm. In dozens of books and hundreds of articles read by millions of people abolitionists, suffragists, socialists, feminists, free lovers, and anarchists debated just how people should have sex. An interracial coalition of abolitionists believed that only by avoiding sex entirely except for procreation could women of all races be free. Against them, Free Lovers and Sex Radicals held that regular sex without orgasm would lead to the perfection of the white race. Together, reformers popularized racial eugenics, helped define and codify heterosexuality, and shaped the emergence of the Third Sex. These debates presaged the “sex wars” that splintered second-wave feminism and point to the importance of remaking the act of sex to women’s emancipation.

This research has been supported by the New York Public Library, the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the University of Michigan, Smith College, the University of Virginia, and the Wisconsin Historical Society, as well as Humanities New York, and the Villanova History in the Public Interest program.

My pedagogy treats study as a site of struggle and care. I believe history offers us tools to broaden our conceptions of what is possible in our present and future. In the classroom, I tether rigorous historical analysis to struggles for social justice. To this end, I aim to build diverse, inclusive spaces that meet students where they are and mentor students towards where they are trying to go. I teach classes on nineteenth- and twentieth-century US history, as well as on the queer history, the histories of the left, and histories of capitalism and political economy.

Sample Courses:

Academic

“Ernest Crosby,” “Walt Whitman,” “New Thought” and “Free Thought” in Paul Buhle and Mari-Jo Buhle eds. The Encyclopedia of the American Left, forthcoming.

Dan Joslyn, Tyesha Maddox, and Robert Soden, “Mutual Aid, Technology, and the Problem of History,” in Scott Knowls ed, COVID Studies: New Directions in Social Science Disaster Research (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023).

Review of Jeremy C. Young, The Age of Charisma: Leaders, Followers, and Emotions in American Society, 1870-1940, in American Nineteenth-Century History, June 9, 2019.

Public Media

“The Broken Promise of The Goop Lab,” Religion Dispatches.

“The Good Place Has A C-Word Problem,” Religion Dispatches.

 “How Cynicism is Hurting the Left,” The Revealer.

“‘ Islam in the Nineteenth-Century American Black Press,” blog of the Journal of the History of Ideas.

“‘Frederick Douglass, Virtue Philosopher,” blog of the Journal of the History of Ideas.

Public Humanities & Organizing

I have long been committed to developing public humanities projects supporting ongoing struggles for social justice with historically grounded research. Through mentoring younger colleagues and students into and through graduate, I developed and now maintain the most extensive list of fully funded MA programs in the humanities.

In 2020, I was one of the core organizers in Mutual Aid NYC, where I helped support the growth of the mutual aid movement and developed a list of accessible resources for people in need in uptown Manhattan. Together with students at NYU and a colleague at Fordham University, I co-developed notariot.com, that introduced moderates to the black radical tradition. This page received tens of thousands of visitors, was used in college courses, and was featured in local news. Out of this work, I co-developed presentations on the histories of local police precincts (and their disproportionate targeting of Black and Brown neighbors), and co-produced an explainer video on the history of Mutual Aid organizing that has been viewed over 1000 times and has been presented in a range of trainings for mutual aid organizers across the nation.

Additionally, I have helped facilitate an oral history project of Bronx-based Mutual Aid organizers and have spent time as a core organizer and facilitator of a feminist collective developing an online archive of organizing resources together with organizers and archivists across New York City and as a tenant-leader in my building’s tenant association and in neighborhood-based organizing.