Bruce Dorsey

Bruce Dorsey is Professor of History at Swarthmore College and writes about the history of gender, sexuality, religion, social movements, and popular culture in the United States. In addition to Murder in a Mill Town, he is the author of two books: Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City (Cornell University Press, 2002), winner of the Philip S. Klein Book Prize from the Pennsylvania Historical Association, and Crosscurrents in American Culture, co-edited with Woody Register (Houghton Mifflin, 2009). In 2016 he was awarded the LGBT Religious History Award for an article published in the Journal of the History of Sexuality.

Dorsey received his PhD from Brown University, and has been awarded fellowships from the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, the Pew Program in Religion and American History at Yale University, the Center for the Study of American Religion at Princeton University, the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) visiting professorship at the University of Erfurt, the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Free University of Berlin, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and Swarthmore College.

At Swarthmore, Dorsey teaches courses on early America, the American Civil War, popular culture, history and memory, the culture wars, and the history of gender and sexuality in America.