{"id":73,"date":"2018-11-20T16:20:52","date_gmt":"2018-11-20T16:20:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/presence\/?page_id=73"},"modified":"2019-01-15T21:01:02","modified_gmt":"2019-01-15T21:01:02","slug":"the-natural-history-of-sexuality-in-early-america","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/presence\/the-natural-history-of-sexuality-in-early-america\/","title":{"rendered":"4\/1: The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America"},"content":{"rendered":"

Greta LaFleur, Assistant Professor of American Studies (Yale University)<\/strong><\/p>\n

“If sexology\u2014the science of sex\u2014came into being sometime in the nineteenth century, then how did statesmen, scientists, and everyday people make meaning out of sex before that point? In this talk, Greta LaFleur explores how eighteenth-century natural history\u2014the study of organic life in its environment\u2014actually provided the intellectual foundations for the later development of the scientific study of sex.”<\/p>\n

Greta LaFleur is Assistant Professor of American Studies. Her research and teaching focuses on early North American literary and cultural studies, the history of science, the history of race, the history and historiography of sexuality, and queer studies. Her first book, The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America<\/em> (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), brings together the history of sexuality and early environmental studies to explore how sexual behaviors were understood in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. She is currently at work on a new book project on the relationship of cultural and legal responses to sexual violence to the history of sexuality. She is also the editor (with Kyla Schuller) of a special issue of American Quarterly<\/em>, organized around the theme of \u201cOrigins of Biopolitics in the Americas\u201d (forthcoming Sept. 2019).<\/p>\n