Jordan Biro Walters

Biography

My research investigates the racial and heteronormative underpinnings of American citizenship, the relationship between mobility and queer identity formation, and the intersections of artistic and sexual freedom. I am also a public historian who specializes in digital, community, and oral history projects.

Courses Taught

• Intro: History of Sexualities
• U.S. Experience to 1877
• A History of Native America
• The Craft of Public History
• LGBTQ+ History of the Twentieth-Century United States
• Race & Ethnicity in Twentieth-Century America
• U.S. Experience since 1877
• Civil War: Gender & Commemoration

Selected Publications & Presentations

• Wide-Open Desert: A Queer History of New Mexico (University of Washington Press, 2023) https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295751016/wide-open-desert/
• Offending Moral Decency: The 1969 Love-Lust Controversy and the Sexual Revolution in New Mexico, Special issue, New Mexico’s 1960s at 50: Documenting Cultural Change in the Land of Enchantment, New Mexico Historical Review 93, No. 4 (Fall 2018)
• ‘So Let Me Paint’: Navajo Artist R.C. Gorman and the Artist, Native, and Queer Subcultures of San Francisco, California, Pacific Historical Review 88, no. 3 (2019): 439–467. [co-recipient of the 2020 Louis Knott Koontz Memorial Award and recipient of the 2020 Jensen-Miller Award]
• “Bachelor Girls or Perverts?: Teaching Histories of Sexuality in Public History Courses,” History @ Workblog, National Council on Public History, May 16, 2017, http://ncph.org/history-at-work/bachelor-girls-or-perverts-teaching-histories-of-sexuality-in-public-history-courses/

Awards & Honors

• Faculty Award in Experiential Learning, College of Wooster, 2021
• Jensen-Miller Award, Western History Association, in recognition of “‘So Let Me Paint’: Navajo Artist R.C. Gorman and the Artistic, Native, and Queer Subcultures of San Francisco, California,” 2020
• Louis Knott Koontz Memorial Award, Pacific Historical Review, in recognition of “‘So Let Me Paint’: Navajo Artist R.C. Gorman and the Artistic, Native, and Queer Subcultures of San Francisco, California”, 2020
• Gault-Welty Business & Community Award, Wayne County Historical Society, 2019
• Harry Ransom Center Research Fellowship in the Humanities, University of Texas at Austin, 2016
• Juliana Wilson Thompson Research Fellowship, College of Wooster, 2016–2017
• American Historical Association-Mellon Career Diversity Fellowship, 2015
• The Dorothy Woodward Memorial Fellowship, Department of History, University of New Mexico, 2013–2014
• George I. Sanchez Fellowship, Center for Southwest Research, University of New Mexico, 2009–2011