I am a historian of the twentieth-century United States. My research and teaching explore histories of gender, sexuality, and race; law enforcement and the state; and feminist activisms in the modern United States. My first book, The Streets Belong to Us: Sex, Race, and Police Power from Segregation to Gentrification, is a history of sexual policing between Prohibition and the rise of broken windows policing in the 1980s. My second project, Going Ballistic: A Concealed History of Feminism and Guns, traces the genealogy of women’s gun politics from the armed feminist Left of the 1970s to the contemporary Second Amendment mobilization.
During the 2024-2025 academic year, I will be a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Faculty Fellow at Princeton University. I teach U.S. gender history at the University of Texas at Dallas. I received my PhD in History from Brown University with a Certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies. Essays adapted from The Streets Belong to Us have appeared in the Journal of American History and the Journal of Social History. I have published op-eds, review essays, and interviews in the Washington Post, Boston Review, Bitch, and elsewhere.
Send me an email: agf at utdallas dot edu