Reimagining Citizenship in Postwar Europe (Cornell University Press, 2025)

A Queer Theory of the State (Floating Opera Press, 2023)

States of Liberation: Gay Men between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany (University of Toronto Press, 2022)

• Winner of the David Barclay Book Prize from the German Studies Association

• Winner of the Charles E. Smith Award from the European History Section of the Southern Historical Association

• Finalist for the Waterloo Centre for German Studies Book Prize

“The Other Half of Germany: New Perspectives and Controversies on East Germany–A Roundtable” (with Katja Hoyer, Christina Morina, and Joyce Mushaben) Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 73 (Spring 2024): 23-60.

“New Research on Social Movements in Cold War Germany: A Roundtable” (with Tiffany N. Florvil, Craig Griffiths, Anna von der Goltz, Kerstin Brückweh, and Richard F. Wetzell) Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 72 (Fall 2023): 3-30.

“A Queer Wall in the Head: Using Oral Histories to Map Gay Desire Across Cold War Germany,” German Studies Review 45.3 (October 2022): 495-515.

“Can Democracy Be Queer?: Male Homosexuality, Democratisation, and the Law in Postwar Germany,” Contemporary European History (2022).

“The Surveillance of Subcultures: Gay Spies, Everyday Life, and Cold War Intelligence in Divided Berlin,” Journal of Social History (2022).

“Heterogeneous Persecution: Lesbianism and the Nazi State,” Central European History 54.2 (2021): 297-325.

„Die Grenzen der Homophobie: Lesbischsein unter nationalsozialistischer Herrschaft,“ in Homosexuelle in Deutschland 1933-1969: Beiträge zu Alltag Stigmatisierung und Verfolgung, edited by Alexander Zinn. V&R Unipress, 2020. 117-129.

“Death Wish: Suicide and Stereotype in the Gay Discourses of Imperial and Weimar Germany” New German Critique 46.1 (1 February 2019): 127-166.

"The Duplicity of Tolerance: Lesbian Experiences in Nazi Berlin" The Journal of Contemporary History 54.1 (first published 3 April 2017): 30-59. 

“A winning strategy for 3×n Cylindrical Hex” (with R. Hayward and B. Toft) Discrete Mathematics 331 (September 2014): 93-97

"An Inductive Proof of Hex Uniqueness" The American Mathematical Monthly 121.1 (January 2014): 78-80.

"The Reception of Homosexuality in Klaus Mann's Weimar-era Works" Monatshefte für deutschsprachige Literatur und Kultur 105.1 (Spring 2013): 86-100.

“Theory Damaged,” The Baffler, 11 June 2024.

“What’s the Matter With Germany?” Foreign Exchanges. 28 May 2024.

“Reading Imagined Communities Amid a Resurgence of Nationalism,” The New Republic. 10 April 2024.

“Queer people have suffered greatly at the hands of the state – that doesn’t mean they can do without it,” ABC Religion & Ethics. 12 February 2024.

“How Germany’s Political Stability May Be Fueling the Rise of the Far Right.” TIME. 29 January 2024.

“The Pendulum of Queer History,” The Baffler. 6 July 2023.

“Finding queer joy in the unlikeliest of places,” CNN Opinion. 13 June 2023.

“The Weimar Republic has a warning for the U.S. about its judges.” Washington Post. 28 October 2022.

“Hilary Mantel, Historian.” Boston Review. 7 October 2022.

“Toward a Queer Theory of the State.” The Point. 26 July 2022.

“Dangerous as the Plague.” The Baffler. 23 June 2022.

“History often has ignored the Nazis' persecution of these women.” CNN Opinion. 2 June 2022.

“Communist states have sometimes been havens for LGBTQ rights.” Washington Post. 22 March 2022.

“East Berlin Stories: Gay Espionage in Cold War Berlin.” The Baffler. 10 March 2022.

“The Beginnings of Queer Citizenship.” Boston Review. 23 February 2022.

“The problem with a U.S.-centric understanding of Pride and LGBTQ rights.” Washington Post. 4 June 2021.

“A Gay Turning Point that Failed to Turn? The Beethoven Hall Podium Discussion of 1980.” History | Sexuality | Law. December 30, 2020.

"Can we hold Trump and his allies accountable without further splitting America?" Washington Post. 16 November 2020.

“An End to Totalitarianism” Boston Review. 16 April 2020.

“What’s Wrong with Queer History?” Boston Review. 28 June 2019.

“Gay Liberation Behind the Iron Curtain” Boston Review. 18 April 2019.

“Queering the Vote” The Los Angeles Review of Books. 27 January 2019.

"Does Germany Hold the Key to Defeating Populism?" The Atlantic. 29 March 2017. 

"Why Gay German Men Are Seeking Reparations for a Homophobic Nazi Law." VICE. 19 August 2016. 

"Die Unsichtbare Tradition: Wo war die schwule Literatur Nachkriegsdeutschlands?" With Adrian Daub. Merkur: Deutsche Zeitschrift für europäisches Denken. September 2016. pp. 88-93. 

“The gay-suicide stereotype kills gay people, and must end.” Aeon. 16 February 2016.

Review of Jeffrey Schneider, Uniform Fantasies: Soldiers, Sex, and Queer Emancipation in Imperial Germany (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2023). Nineteenth-Century Contexts (2024).

Review of Věra Sokolová, Queer Encounters with Communist Power: Non-Heterosexual Lives and the State in Czechoslovakia, 1948–1989 (Prague: Karolinum Press, 2021). Austrian History Yearbook (2024).

“What Holocaust Remembrance Forgets.” Review of Dan Stone, The Holocaust: An Unfinished History (New York: Mariner Books, 2024), The New Republic. 18 January 2024.

“Yascha Mounk’s Woke Straw Man.” Review of Yascha Mounk, The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time (New York: Penguin, 2023). The New Republic. 26 October 2023.

"The Lost History of East Germany." Review of Katja Hoyer, Beyond the Wall: A History of East Germany (New York: Basic Books, 2023). The New Republic. 22 September 2023. 

“Critically Cringe.” Review of Susan Neiman, Left is Not Woke (Cambridge: Polity, 2023). Los Angeles Review of Books. 17 September 2023.

“Haunted by Queer Marxism.” Review of Petrus Liu, The Specter of Materialism: Queer Theory and Marxism in the Age of the Beijing Consensus (Durham: Duke University Press, 2023). Los Angeles Review of Books. 14 May 2023.

“East German History and the Crisis of Liberal Democracy,” Central European History 55, no. 4 (December 2022): 576-586.

Review of W. Jake Newsome, Pink Triangle Legacies: Coming Out in the Shadow of the Holocaust (Cornell University Press, 2022). In: Journal of Social History (February 2023).

Review of Craig Griffiths, The Ambivalence of Gay Liberation: Male Homosexual Politics in 1970s West Germany (Oxford University Press, 2021). In: Journal of the History of Sexuality 31, no. 3 (September 2022): 411-413.

“Why Does the State Care About Your Gender?” Review of Paisley Currah, Sex Is As Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity (New York: NYU Press, 2022). Boston Review. 7 July 2022.

“The Slow Advance of LGBTQ Rights in Washington, D.C.” Review of James Kirchick, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington (New York: Henry Holt, 2022). The New Republic. 8 June 2022.

“All Hail the Appeasers.” Review of Munich: The Edge of War (dir. Christian Schwochow, 2021). Los Angeles Review of Books. 6 June 2022.

“A Politics of Stigma.” Review of Heather Love, Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021). Los Angeles Review of Books. 8 March 2022.

Review of Benno Gammerl, anders fühlen: Schwules und lesbisches Leben in der Bundesrepublik: Eine Emotionsgeschichte (Carl Hanser Verlag, 2021). In: L’Homme: Europäische Zeitschrift für feministische Geschichtswissenschaft 32, no. 2 (2021): 153-156.

Review of Tom Smith, Comrades in Arms: Military Masculinities in East German Culture (Berghahn Books, 2020). In: Central European History 54, no. 3 (September 2021): 589-590.

“The Queer Other: Queerness under the sign of conservative Islam.” Review of Evren Savcı, Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal Islam (Duke University Press, 2021). The Baffler. 24 June 2021.

“‘Do Not Ask Me Who I Am’: Foucault and Neoliberalism.” Review of Mitchell Dean and Daniel Zamora, The Last Man Takes LSD: Foucault and the End of Revolution (Verso, 2021). The Point. 2 June 2021.

“Beyond Gay Imperialism.” Review of Mark Gevisser, The Pink Line: Journeys Across the World’s Queer Frontiers (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). The Baffler. 24 March 2021.

"Black Germans and the Politics of Diaspora." Review of Tiffany N. Florvil, Mobilizing Black Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement (University of Illinois Press, 2020). Los Angeles Review of Books. 25 February 2021.

“The Death of the Gay Bar.” Review of Jeremy Atherton Lin, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out (Little, Brown & Co., 2021). Boston Review. 18 February 2021.

Review of Christopher Chitty, Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the World System (Durham: Duke UP, 2020). In: Journal of Social History (first published 29 January 2021).

Review of Hugh Ryan, When Brooklyn was Queer (St. Martin's Press, 2019). In: Invertito: Jahrbuch für die Geschichte der Homosexualitäten 22 (2020): 147-149.

"When Democracy Ails, Magic Thrives." Review of Monica Black, A Demon-Haunted Land: Witches, Wonder Doctors, and the Ghosts of the Past in Post-WWII Germany (Metropolitan Books, 2020). Boston Review. 29 October 2020.

“Seduced by Respectability.” Review of Javier Samper Vendrell, The Seduction of Youth: Print Culture and Homosexual Rights in Weimar Germany (Toronto University Press, 2020). The Point. 19 August 2020.

“Recovering Queer Identities.” Review of Jen Manion, Female Husbands: A Trans History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). Los Angeles Review of Books. 18 July 2020.

"The Long Fight for LGBT Labor Equality." Review of Eric Cervini, The Deviant's War: The Homosexual vs. The United States (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). Boston Review. 17 June 2020.

“Cashing in on Queerness.” Review of David K. Johnson, Buying Gay: How Physique Entrepreneurs Sparked a Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019). The Point. 20 February 2020.

“Atone—But Not Because it Will Save Democracy.” Review of Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2019). Boston Review, 16 December 2019.

“Introduction.” with Benjamin P. Hein and Michelle Lynn Kahn. H-Diplo Roundtable XXI-14 on Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna. 15 November 2019.

“The Inadequacies of Justice.” Review of Mary Fulbrook, Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). Los Angeles Review of Books, 21 July 2019.

“Was Socialism Sexy?” Review of Kristen R. Ghodsee, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence (New York: Nation Books, 2018). The Point, 3 April 2019.

“What’s Left of the Gay Left?” Review of Martin Duberman, Has the Gay Movement Failed? (Berkeley: UC Press, 2018). The Point, 7 December 2018.

“Politics of Hate.” Review of Dan Healey, Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017). Los Angeles Review of Books, 26 October 2018.

Review of Clayton Whisnant. Queer Identities and Politics in Germany: A History, 1880-1945. (New York: Harrington Park Press, 2016). In: Invertito: Jahrbuch für die Geschichte der Homosexualitäten, Vol. 20 (2018), 174-177. 

Review of Jennifer Evans, ed., Queering German History, special issue of German History: The Journal of the German History Society 34 (2016), Nr. 3. In: Invertito: Jahrbuch für die Geschichte der Homosexualitäten, Vol. 19 (2017), 185-187.