Nicholas Syrett
Nicholas Syrett joined the faculty in 2006 and is currently an associate professor. 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. He has published on the history of masculinity and sexuality in traditionally white college fraternities, and on queer history during the early to mid twentieth century. He is currently writing a book on the history of child marriage and the regulation of children’s sexuality in the United States; is co-editing (with Corinne T. Field) a collection of essays on the significance of chronological age in American history; and continues to write about queer history.
Syrett has published articles in American Studies, Genders, the Journal of the History of Sexuality, and in a collection of essays called Clio in the Classroom: A Guide for Teaching U.S. Women’s History (Oxford UP). He has articles forthcoming in the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth and in Children and Youth in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (NYU Press). His book, The Company He Keeps: A History of White College Fraternities, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2009 and released in paperback last year.
He has been interviewed about his research by Inside Higher Ed, Newsweek, Out, North Carolina Public Radio, The Current (the daily radio news program of the CBC in Canada), BackStory, Times Higher Education (U.K.), and various local and college newspapers. He has also published pieces in theNew York Times and American Sexuality, the online magazine of the National Sexuality Resource Center. 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 UNC’s GLBTA Resource Center.
He is on leave for the 2012-13 academic year.
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