it me! — in newfoundland

I’m an archivist, a public historian, an author, a researcher, and a knowledge organizer.

I am the Archivist-Historian for the Consensual Non-Monogamies section of the American Psychological Association. I also work as a graduate archivist at the Kinsey Institute, where I am currently working on a linked data controlled vocabulary of Sexual Nomenclature.

Additionally, I work as a research/project assistant with Dr. Marika Cifor and Dr. Robert D. Montoya on a project called Classifying, Documenting, and Preserving Human Sexuality at the Kinsey Institute.

I am currently especially interested in histories of sexuality, censorship, and queer theory, and in applying these histories to knowledge organization, radical/queer classification, and archives.

In the past, I have been a volunteer moderator for the world’s largest academic history forum, AskHistorians, where I recorded and edited 50 episodes of The AskHistorians Podcast and presented at many conferences with them.

I received my undergraduate degrees in English and History at Keene State College, a small liberal arts college in New Hampshire, where I grew up. After this, I received a MA in History and Culture from Drew University, where my thesis was on the history of pornography in England. I am currently pursuing a MLIS in Archives and Digital Humanities at Indiana University Bloomington with plans to apply for a PhD in Information Science.

My first book, Annals of Pornographie: How Porn Became Bad resulted in an appearance on Conan O’Brien and elsewhere, and I am currently working on a history of popular understandings of sexuality between WWII and the start of the AIDS Crisis and the Reagan/Thatcher ‘rebellions.’ I am also working (with Sarah Stein Lubrano) on an anthology of nonmonogamies in history that can be followed on Twitter @polyhistories. I have forthcoming book chapters in Edinburgh History of Reading, Literature’s Kinkiest Corners and elsewhere.

Find me on Twitter @brimwats.

If you want a downloadable c.v., click here: Brian Watson, c.v. for the web 9-21-2019