I am a historian of gender and sexuality, education, and the politics, society, and culture of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain. I am Lecturer in LGBTQ+ History/History of Sexuality at the University of Glasgow. I received my PhD in History from Columbia University in 2020, and was a Junior Research Fellow and tutor in History at Merton and Corpus Christi Colleges, Oxford from 2020 until 2024.

My research focuses on the categories that people have used to make sense of, categorise, and regulate gender and sexuality; how these have changed over time; what intellectual sources informed their ideas; how these ideas have interacted with the structures of the state and other regulatory institutions; and what the experiences of members of gender and sexual minority communities can tell us about the broader logics that govern gender and sexuality in the modern West.

My first book, Teaching Gender: The British University and the Rise of Heterosexuality, 1860–1939, is under contract with Oxford University Press. Teaching Gender explains the construction of the male/female and hetero/homo binaries in early-twentieth-century Britain through the improbable but illuminating lens of higher education reform. Drawing on extensive research in the archives of ten colleges and universities across England and Scotland, I show that the nationalisation and centralisation of higher education at the turn of the twentieth century resulted incidentally in coeducation, over the protest of feminist activists who supported gender segregation; that students’ negotiation of cross-gender interaction in coeducational universities ultimately led them to identify heterosexuality as a seemingly less fraught paradigm than more gender-neutral conceptions of ‘corporate life’; and that single-sex men’s and women’s colleges, though increasingly marginal, became important sites for the theorisation of life paths and identities outside the heterosexual norm. Through detailed recovery both of political and financial decision-making and of the experiences and emotions of faculty, students, administrators, donors, and national politicians, I paint a vivid and resonant picture of the university campus as a key site for the transmission of norms around gender and sexuality.

I am currently working on four other projects:

• an article about the prehistory of queer theory, exploring how John Addington Symonds, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and other theorists characterised the male homosexual subject as constituted through culture wars about canonicity and ‘western civilisation’
• a book-length survey of British LGBTQ+ history, based on my undergraduate teaching, which uses queer and trans history as a lens through which to refract the political and social history of the British Isles from 1820 to the present
• early research for a potential project about the debates around the equalisation of the age of consent in late-twentieth-century Britain
• a collaborative, practical project about trans history pedagogy

I also maintain an active interest in queer classical reception; and I am becoming increasingly interested in the history of the internet.

I am happy for you to use either ‘he’ or ‘they’ pronouns to refer to me. Before 2024, I published under the name Emily Rutherford.