Laurie Marhoefer

Project Description

Associate Professor, Department of History

Ph.D. Rutgers University (2008)

Faculty Profile

I am a historian of Weimar and Nazi Germany (1918-45). I study politics. My first book is on fascism and the politics of sex and gender in Germany before 1933. It is Sex and the Weimar Republic: German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis (2015), and it also reexamines the gay and trans rights movement of the 1920s, which was the world’s first. My work has been published in The American Historical Review, German Studies Review, and elsewhere.

I also occasionally write commentary on contemporary American politics from the perspective of German history. My essays have been published on Salon.com, Newsweek.com, and elsewhere, and quoted in The Washington Post. I have been on NPR’s To the Point and Seattle’s KUOW to talk about American politics and the history of fascism and antifascism.

Current work in progress includes a book on queer sexuality and transgender and the Nazi-era police and courts, a project on blackness and citizenship in Germany in the 1920s, and a transnational study of gay politics in the final third of the twentieth century. Before joining the history department at the University of Washington, I was an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto and a Senior Research Associate at the University of Oxford as well as an assistant and most recently associate professor at Syracuse University in Syracuse, NY, where I won a Meredith Teaching Recognition Award in 2015.