Professor Dorsey is the author of Murder in a Mill Town: Sex, Faith, and the Crime that Captivated a Nation, (Oxford University Press, 2023), the story of a local crime that became a national scandal and America's first "trial of the century," based on the 1833 murder trial of Methodist minister, Ephraim K. Avery, accused of murdering Sarah Maria Cornell, a female factory worker. Murder in a Mill Town was awarded the Peter J. Gomes Memorial Book Prize. In March 2026, Swarthmore will host the world premiere performance of a choral work, American Martyr, composed by C. Leonard Raybon, inspired by this book.

Dorsey’s first book, Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City (Cornell University Press, 2002), was awarded the Philip S. Klein Book Prize. He also 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. Professor Dorsey is currently researching a book that unravels the connections between popular culture and divisive American politics during the origins of the "culture wars" in the late 1970s.

Professor Dorsey has been elected a member of the Society of American Historians, founded in 1939 to promote literary excellence in the writing of history.

Author website: brucedorsey.net