Oral history interview with Sarah E. Chinn, 2015

Biographical Note

Sarah E. Chinn got her PhD in English from Columbia University in 1996, and was co-founder in 1991 of the Lesbian and Gay Studies Reading Group, which held their meetings and events at IRWAG. She now teaches American Literatures and Cultures and is the Chair of the English Department at Hunter College, CUNY. Her work primarily explores questions of race, sexuality, and gender in U.S. literature and culture, particularly in the 19th century. She teaches a wide range of courses from Nineteenth Century Women Writers to Early American Drama to Literary Theory to Post-1945 Lesbian and Gay Narratives. She is the author of Technology and the Logic of American Racism: A Cultural History of the Body as Evidence (Continuum, 2000) and Inventing Modern Adolescence: Children of Immigrants in Turn-of-the-Century America (Rutgers University Press, 2008). In 2017, her book Spectacular Men: Race, Gender, and Nation on the Early American Stage, 1780-1830 was published by Oxford University Press. From 2007 to 2011, she was the Executive Director of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center

Scope and Contents

In the first session of this interview, Chinn discusses her adolescence after moving to New York City from London at age 15. Chinn describes the political campaigns she was involved with in London, as well as the youth culture of downtown New York City in the 1980s. Chinn attended Yale University for her undergraduate studies, and discusses impacts of the AIDs epidemic and student organizing on the New Haven campus. Chinn talks about the challenges she faced as a graduate student at Columbia University and her subsequent creation of the Queer Studies Group. Chinn names Patrick Horrigan, Mario DiGangi, and Liz Wiesen as core organizers of the Queer Studies Group, and Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick as attendees. Chinn describes the interest in work being done around gender and queer studies even without a formal curriculum. In the second session of this interview, Chinn describes her experience teaching at Columbia University, Randolph Macon College, and Trinity College before arriving at Hunter College, where she sat as Chair of the English Department. Chinn moved back to New York, and began to do work for the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League (NARAL) while teaching at SUNY Purchase. Chinn describes her experience starting a family without maternity leave and the subsequent challenges of being a professor with young children. Chinn explains how she prioritizes her students and takes her role as a mentor seriously as a result of the challenges she has faced in academia. Chinn names the New York Chapter of the American Studies Association as a site of academic camaraderie and mentorship. Chinn spends the final portion of the interview discussing her teaching and parenting goals. She explains her recent return to activism, citing Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter events. Finally, Chinn discusses the differences between private and public institutions and the departmental politics she has engaged with at Hunter College since her appointment in 2001

Subjects

• AIDS (Disease)--United States--History.
• American Studies Association. Metropolitan New York Chapter.
• Chinn, Sarah E.--Interviews.
• College teachers--Interviews.
• Columbia University. Institute for Research on Women and Gender.
• Dziedzic, Sarah, interviewer.
• Gay and lesbian studies.
• Gay rights--United States.
• Hunter College.
• Interviews.
• Motherhood.
• Oral histories (literary works)

Access Conditions

Copyright by the Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York, 2015