Joan Lubin

Joan Lubin’s research and teaching focus on modern and contemporary American literature, media, and culture, queer and trans theory, history of science, sociology of literature, and book history. Lubin is currently finishing Pulp Sexology, a book project about the imprint of quantitative sexology on postwar literature and culture, and starting another about the pedagogical history of science fiction. Lubin is also editing a critical selection of letters between queer sci-fi greats Samuel R. Delany and Joanna Russ. Her research has been supported by the John Money Fellowship for Scholars of Sexology at the Kinsey Institute and the Ursula K. Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellowship at the University of Oregon Libraries and Special Collections. Lubin’s research-based arts writing has appeared in exhibition catalogues including Scientia Sexualis (ICA Los Angeles, 2024) and Sci-fi, Magick, Queer LA: Sexual Science and the Imagi-Nation (ONE Archives at USC Libraries, 2024). She is editor of “Sexology and Its Afterlives,” a 2021 special issue of Social Text, and her work has appeared in journals and books including Post45, New Literary History, American Literary History, Women & Performance, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies (NYU 2021), The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature (Cambridge UP, 2024), and elsewhere. Previously, Lubin was Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Science & Literature in the Society for the Humanities and the English Department at Cornell University, Director of Research for special collections in the Cornell University Library, and Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at Durham University in the UK. She holds a BA in Women’s Studies from UCLA and received her PhD in English with a concentration in Gender and Sexuality Studies from the University of Pennsylvania.