About Me | Christopher Ewing | Assistant Professor | Purdue University
I am assistant professor of history at Purdue University, working on problems of sexuality, race, and violence in contemporary German history. I take a transnational approach to social and political history, investigating movements of historical actors across European borders and around the Atlantic world.
My first book, The Color of Desire: The Queer Politics of Race in the Federal Republic of Germany after 1970, examines the multiple and often contradictory ways in which race, racism, and anti-racism entered queer political movements in the aftermath of gay liberation. Far from being a peripheral theme, the politics of race were crucial to queer movements in the Federal Republic. Just as many white gay and lesbian Germans both excluded and instrumentalized people of color to make often contradictory political claims, anti-racist activists pushed back against overlapping forms of marginalization, which held lasting ramifications for queer politics more broadly. Only in attending to racism and antiracism together can we explain both troubling undercurrents of contemporary queer politics and the radical possibilities that it continues to offer. The Color of Desire was published by Cornell University Press in 2023.
I am currently working on a new manuscript. The first asks hate became an international crime. Beginning in the 1980s, activists and lawmakers in the United States and Europe crafted new categories of crime to make sense of violence against minoritized groups. These efforts coalesced in the 1990s into the “hate crime” framework, with which we are familiar today. However, this process was neither smooth nor neutral. Instead it was marked with tensions about the appropriate role of the state in preventing violence, concerns about freedom of speech, and questions about who should - or shouldn’t - be protected from harm. Hate crime today, particularly as linked to hate speech - who can say what about whom? - is far from settled.
To investigate this process, I direct the Global Security, Technology, and Violence (GSTV) History Lab at Purdue. The experiential pedagogy initiative examines the history of political violence and white supremacy in the United States and Europe while introducing students to digital and archival historical research tools.
In addition to my work on hate crime and violence, I work on the history of international sex tourism since the 1960s. Together with my colleague Ulrike Schaper at the Leibniz-Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung Potsdam, I have written on combined histories of gay and straight tourism, as well as questions of sexual harm and racialized desire in the making of transnational queer politics.