James Polchin

As a writer and cultural historian, my teaching and research focuses on creative nonfiction, history of sexuality, visual culture studies, and crime narratives. I have taught in the Princeton Writing Program, the Parsons School of Design, the New School for Public Engagement, and the Creative Nonfiction Foundation. For a number of years I taught at NYU sites in London, Paris, and Florence. My essays and reviews have been published in The New Inquiry, Lambda Literary, Brevity, and Ducts Magazine, and for several years I was the Arts Columnist at The Smart Set, where my reviews were regularly featured on Arts and Letters Daily and 3 Quarks Daily. For over ten years I have been a contributing writer to the Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide. My book Indecent Advances: A Hidden History of True Crime and Prejudice Before Stonewall (2019) is a hybrid of true crime and cultural history that looks at how popular culture, the media, and the psychological profession forcefully portrayed gay men as the perpetrators of the same violence they suffered. The book traces how the press depicted the murder of men by other men from the end of World War I to the Stonewall era, when gay men came to be seen as a class both historically victimized and increasingly visible.