Nicholas Syrett
Nicholas Syrett joined the faculty in 2006 and is currently Assistant Professor and Director of Graduate Studies. Syrett earned his A.B. in Women’s and Gender Studies from Columbia University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the Program in American Culture at the University of Michigan. He is interested in the history of women, gender, and sexuality in the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His research and writing have primarily focused upon the construction of masculinity and sexuality in traditionally white college fraternities and on histories of queer sexuality. He is at work on a book on the history of child marriage and sexuality in America and continues to write about queer history.
Syrett has published essays and reviews in American Studies, Men and Masculinities, the Pacific Historical Review, and in a collection of essays called Clio in the Classroom: A Guide for Teaching U.S. Women’s History (Oxford). He has articles and reviews forthcoming in the Journal of the History of Sexuality, the American Historical Review, Historical Studies in Education, and the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Social History. His book, The Company He Keeps: A History of White College Fraternities, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2009 and recently released in paperback.
About his research on fraternities and the history of sexuality he has been interviewed by Inside Higher Ed, Newsweek, Out, North Carolina Public Radio, The Current (the daily news program of Canada’s CBC Radio), Times Higher Education online(U.K.), and various local and college newspapers. He has also published pieces in the New York Times and American Sexuality, the online magazine of the National Sexuality Resource Center. He sits on the Governing Board of the Committee on LGBT History, an affiliate of the American Historical Association.
This year Prof. Syrett will offer classes in U.S. women’s history and graduate seminars in historiography and on the history of slavery in America. He will teach the second half of the U.S. history survey in the fall. In 2010-2011 he was given the first annual Diversity in the Classroom award by UNC’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Outstanding Supportive Faculty Member Award by the GLBTA Resource Center.
Classes
Syrett offers the following classes at UNC:
- HIST 101: Survey of American History from 1877 to the Present
- HIST 290: American Immigration
- HIST 323: Marriage and Family in the United States
- HIST 326: Sex and Sexuality in the United States
- HIST 347: United States Women’s History to 1877
- HIST 348: United States Women’s History since 1877
- HIST 430: American Queer History
- HIST 530: Slavery in America
- HIST 530: Graduate Seminar on Gender in American History
- HIST 600: Introduction to Graduate Historical Study