The History Matters academic year event series resumes this semester with a discussion of censorship battles in American culture. Historian Brett Gary will introduce his book, Dirty Works: Obscenity on Trial in America’s First Sexual Revolution, an award-winning study of key legal battles over literary and sexual censorship from the late 19th through the mid-20th century. His work examines the transformation of the nation’s obscenity laws through the legal travails of pioneering and controversial sex researchers and educators, birth control activists, and literary modernists, paving the way for the sexual revolutions and culture war conflicts to follow. In conversation with Sarah Lawrence professor Matthew Ellis, Gary will consider the censorship strategies and spectacles that continue to rattle the nation’s legislatures, schools, and libraries – over art, literature, history, reproductive rights, and queer bodily autonomy – followed by a discussion with the audience.
This event is free and open to the public. Guests are invited to join Brett Gary and the college community on campus or join via Zoom. For those attending in person, a reception will follow.
Brett Gary is a cultural historian and Associate Professor in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at NYU. He received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in American Studies, and is the author of The Nervous Liberals: Propaganda Anxieties from WWI to the Cold War (Columbia University Press), and Dirty Works: Obscenity on Trial in America’s First Sexual Revolution (Stanford University press), for which he won the Gold Medal from the Independent Publishers Book Awards for the best book in U.S. History in 2022.
Brett has been at NYU since 2004, and teaches courses with a historical approach to media, culture, and politics, including classes on Censorship in American Culture, Hollywood and American History, Changing Depictions of Masculinity in Hollywood Films, Resisting Dystopia, and more.
He is the recipient of NYU’s Distinguished Teaching Award, the Steinhardt School’s Teaching Excellence Award, and recently (and happily) received an award from an NYU student organization, the Undergraduate Student Government Departmental Service Award.