Margot Canaday

Margot Canaday is a legal and political historian who studies gender and sexuality in modern America. She holds a B.A. from the University of Iowa and a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. Her first book, "The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth Century America," won the Organization of American Historians' Ellis Hawley Prize, the American Political Science Association's Gladys M. Kammerer Award (co-winner), the American Studies Association's Lora Romero Prize, the American Society for Legal History's Cromwell Book Prize, the Committee on LGBT History's John Boswell Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Studies, as well as the Association of American Law Schools' Order of the Coif Biennial Book Award.

Canaday has won fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the Princeton University Society of Fellows, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies. With Thomas Sugrue, Stephen Pitti, Matt Lassiter, and Keisha Blain, she is co-editor of the series "Politics and Culture in Modern America" at the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Canaday's current research shifts her focus from the state to the economy and takes on the idea that twentieth-century workplaces were part of the "straight world" – zones in which LGBT people historically disappeared. Her latest book, "Queer Career: Sexuality and Work in Modern America," draws on business, labor, and legal records, as well as memoirs and oral histories, to demonstrate by contrast how workplaces mattered to queer lives in the past.