Bruce Dorsey
Professor
Department Chair, History (co-chair)
History
Contact
Bruce Dorsey teaches courses in U.S. history, ranging from the American Revolution and the American Civil War to thematic courses such as Remembering History, American Popular Culture, and Divided America: A History of the Culture Wars. Professor Dorsey's teaching and research interests are focused on the history of gender and sexuality, religion and social movements, popular culture, and politics in the United States.
His first book, Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City (Cornell University Press, 2002), was awarded the Philip S. Klein Book Prize by the Pennsylvania Historical Association. He co-edited Crosscurrents in American Culture (Houghton Mifflin, 2009). His article "'Making Men What they Should Be': Male Same-Sex Intimacy and Evangelical Religion in Early Nineteenth-Century New England," Journal of the History of Sexuality 24 (2015), 345-77, was awarded the Virginia Ramey Mollenkott Award by the LGBTQ Religious Archives Network. In 2023, he published Murder in a Mill Town: Sex, Faith, and the Crime that Captivated a Nation, (Oxford University Press, 2023), which tells the story of how a local crime quickly turned into a national scandal that became America's first "trial of the century," based on the 1833 murder trial of Methodist minister, Ephraim K. Avery, accused of murdering a female factory worker. Professor Dorsey is currently researching the connections between popular culture and divisive American politics at the origins of the "culture wars" in the late 1970s.
Author website: brucedorsey.net
