Martha Robinson Rhodes
SPAN Postdoctoral Fellow in Sexuality Studies
Ph.D., Birmingham, 2021
- martha.robinsonrhodes@northwestern.edu
- Harris 331
- Office Hours: By appointment only
Interests
Geographic Field(s): Modern European History: Britain and Its Empire
Thematic Field(s): Gender and Sexuality History; Political and Policy History
Principal Research Interest(s): Queer history; sexuality studies; oral history; modern British history
Martha Robinson Rhodes received her PhD in History from the University of Birmingham (UK) in 2021. She is a historian of modern sexuality, particularly interested in the experiences of people who slipped through the cracks of binary constructions of identity and attraction. Martha’s work uses queer oral history alongside archival sources to investigate how the historically-contingent binaries of ‘gay’ and ‘straight’, ‘normative’ and ‘deviant’ were created and reinforced by gay and lesbian politics as well as dominant straight society in the late twentieth century. She previously worked as a Policy and Research Officer at Stonewall, Europe’s largest LGBTQ+ charity. Her article ‘Bisexuality, Multiple-Gender-Attraction and Gay Liberation Politics in the 1970s’ won Twentieth Century British History‘s Duncan Tanner Prize and was selected as one of Oxford University Press’s Best of History 2020. Her work also appears in the Routledge edited collection New Directions in Queer Oral History: Archives of Disruption, as well as Stonewall’s website and TikTok account!