Chad Heap

Chad Heap is an historian of American sexuality and urban culture, the current director of the Columbian College of Arts and Science’s M.A. program in Museums, History & Culture, and the former CCAS associate dean for graduate studies (2019-2025).

In his writing and teaching, Professor Heap focuses on the changing sexual norms of the nation; the insights that the study of sexuality can provide into American culture and politics; and the role that urban culture and space have played in shaping Americans’ understanding of sexual practices, identities, and communities. He teaches courses that examine the history of sexuality in the United States from the colonial era to the present; the ways that gender and sexuality have shaped American citizenship since the Second World War; and the insights that Washington sex scandals provide into a number of broader historical transformations in American culture and politics.

Heap is the author of Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885-1940 (University of Chicago Press, 2009), which shows how this distinctive cultural practice transformed the popular conceptualization of racial and sexual difference in turn-of-the-century New York and Chicago. He argues that slumming not only created spaces where affluent whites could cross preconceived racial and sexual boundaries but also contributed significantly to the emergence and codification of a new twentieth-century hegemonic social order—one that was structured primarily around an increasingly polarized white/black racial axis and a hetero/homo sexual binary that were defined in reciprocal relationship to one another. (Slumming was one of three finalists for the 2010 Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction presented by The Publishing Triangle, the Association of Lesbians and Gay Men in Publishing.)

Heap’s current research focuses on family secrets and forgotten pasts, using his own genealogical discoveries to explore how the family histories that Americans have chosen to forget not only provide insight into the nation’s changing social and sexual mores but also help to shore up particular histories of the nation’s founding and definitions of American belonging. In another ongoing research project, he examines the history of the study of sexuality as a social construction and the making of sexual knowledge in Chicago.

A scholar of U.S. social, cultural and urban history, Professor Heap has chaired or co-chaired dissertations focused on the sub/urbanization of country music and Nashville's country music industry; African American consumer culture in interwar Washington, DC; the discursive representation of suburban dangers in the 1970s and ’80s; and nineteenth-century suicide politics as an essential catalyst in the emergence of American eugenics.

Heap co-directed a 2018 NEH Summer Seminar for College and University Teachers on “Art and Public Culture in Chicago” at the Newberry Library, and has also served as a curator, consultant, or advisor for exhibitions and related programming at the University of Chicago Library, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, the Chicago History Museum, and the Newberry Library.

He is the recipient of a Walter Hines Page Fellowship from the National Humanities Center, a Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellowship from the Newberry Library in Chicago, a Sexuality Research Dissertation Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council with funds provided by the Ford Foundation, and the James C. Hormel Dissertation Fellowship in Lesbian and Gay Studies from the Center for Gender Studies at the University of Chicago. He has also been a visiting scholar at New York University’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.