Rachel Corbman
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Mail code: 2151Campus: West
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Rachel Corbman is a historian of U.S. feminist and queer social movements in the late twentieth century. She specializes in the intellectual history of these movements. Her first book, "Conferencing on the Edge: A Queer History of Feminist Field Formation," is under contract with the Theory Q series at Duke University Press. Recognized by the CLAGS: the Center for LGBTQ Studies fellowship award (2017) and the Ralph Henry Gabriel dissertation prize (2019, honorable mention), Conferencing on the Edge tells the story of five academic conferences with notable citational afterlives in feminist and queer studies. Her second book project, "Before Crip Theory," is a history of disability activism in the long women's liberation movement. Her research has been published (or is forthcoming) in peer-reviewed journals such as Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, Feminist Formations, Continuum: Journal in Media and Cultural Studies, and Historie social/Social History.
In addition to her scholarly research, much of Corbman's work is public facing. She held an Andrew W. Mellon predoctoral fellowship in women's and public history at the New-York Historical Society (2018-2019) and a CLIR postdoctoral fellowship in community data at the University of Toronto (2022-2024). She currently serves on the advisory board of OutHistory and the LGBT Community Center National History Archive and is a longtime member of the coordinating committee of the Lesbian Herstory Archives. In 2019, she curated the Wide World of Lesbian Cats, an exhibit at the LGBT Community Center in New York that excavated a history of cat memes in lesbian, feminist, and queer print and digital culture from the 1970s to the present.
She teaches courses in Women and Gender Studies, Social and Cultural Analysis, and Disability Studies in the School of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies (SHArCS).
Ph.D. Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Stony Brook University (2019)
feminist and queer theory and history; disability studies; transgender studies; the public and digital humanities
Book Manuscript in progress
“Conferencing on the Edge: A Queer History of Feminist Field Formation, 1969-1989” (under contract with Theory Q series, Duke University Press)
Peer-Reviewed journal articles
“A Long Story About Sarah Schulman’s ‘A Short Story about a Penis’: Lesbian History and Queer Method,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (forthcoming)
“Biography as Method: Lesbian Feminism, Disability Activism, and Anti-Psychiatry in the Work of Seamoon House,” Historie sociale/Social History, special issue on “Activist Lives” 53.108 (2020): 397-414
“Does Queer Studies Have an Anti-Empiricism Problem?” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, “GLQ at 25” special issue, 25.1 (2019): 57-62
“Remediating Disability Activism in the Lesbian Feminist Archive,” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, special issue on “Thinking Beyond the Backlash: Remediating 1980s Activisms,” 32.1 (2017): 18-28
“Getting From Then to Now: Sustaining the Lesbian Herstory Archives as a Lesbian Organization,” co-written with Deborah Edel, Morgan Gwenwald, Joan Nestle, Flavia Rando, Shawnta Smith-Cruz, and Polly Thistlethwaite, Journal of Lesbian Studies, special issue on “Lesbian Organizations and Organizing,” 20.2 (2015): 213-233
“The Scholars and the Feminists: The Barnard Sex Conference and the History of the Institutionalization of Feminism,” Feminist Formations, special issue on “Institutional Feelings: Practicing Women’s Studies in the Corporate University,” 27.3 (2015): 49-80
“A Genealogy of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, 1974-2014,” The Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies, Volume 1, Article 1 (2014): 1-16
Book Chapters
With Jed Samer, “I was a Lesbian Child: Art, Archives, and the Gay and Lesbian History Movement,” invited contribution to the Oxford Handbook of LGBTQ History edited by Dominic Janes and Howard Chiang (in press)
“Holly Near on Tour with the National Women’s Studies Association,” invited contribution to Feminist Studies: Foundations, Conversations, Applications, edited by Hemangini Gupta, Kelly Sharron, Carly Thomsen, and Abraham Weil (in press)
“Tool Optimism: The 1979 Second Sex Conference and the Afterlives of Audre Lorde,” invited contribution to Routledge Companion to Intersectionality, edited by Jennifer Nash and Samantha Pinto (2023)
Courses
2025 Spring
| Course Number | Course Title |
|---|---|
| DST 394 | Special Topics |
| DST 394 | Special Topics |
| AMS 276 | U.S. Women's Movements |
| WST 276 | U.S. Women's Movements |
2024 Fall
| Course Number | Course Title |
|---|---|
| WST 100 | Women, Gender, and Society |