Dr Sam Rutherford

Lecturer in LGBTQ+ History or the History of Sexuality (History)

email: Sam.Rutherford@glasgow.ac.uk
pronouns: He/him/his

Room 301, 1 University Gardens, Glasgow, G12 8QQ

Biography

I am a historian of gender and sexuality, education, ideas, and the politics, society, and culture of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain. Before coming to Glasgow, I studied in the US and in England, and spent four years as a postdoctoral researcher and tutor in Oxford.

At Glasgow I teach courses in modern British and LGBTQ+ history at Honours and PGT level. I convene the in-person and distance-learning MSc programmes in Gender History.

I am a member of the Glasgow Lab for Intersex, Non-Binary and Trans Studies (GLINTS) and of the Centre for Gender History.

Research interests

I am a historian of gender and sexuality predominantly in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain. My research focuses on the categories that people have used to make sense of, categorise, and regulate gender and sexuality; how these have changed over time; what intellectual sources informed their ideas; how these ideas have interacted with the structures of the state and other regulatory institutions; and what the experiences of members of gender and sexual minority communities can tell us about the broader logics that govern gender and sexuality in the modern West.

My first book, Teaching Gender: The British University and the Rise of Heterosexuality, 1860–1939, was published by Oxford University Press in 2025. Teaching Gender explains the construction of the male/female and hetero/homo binaries in early-twentieth-century Britain through the improbable but illuminating lens of higher education reform. Drawing on extensive research in the archives of ten colleges and universities across England and Scotland, I show that the nationalisation and centralisation of higher education at the turn of the twentieth century resulted incidentally in coeducation, over the protest of feminist activists who supported gender segregation; that students’ negotiation of cross-gender interaction in coeducational universities ultimately led them to identify heterosexuality as a seemingly less fraught paradigm than more gender-neutral conceptions of 'corporate life'; and that single-sex men’s and women’s colleges, though increasingly marginal, became important sites for the theorisation of life paths and identities outside the heterosexual norm. Through detailed recovery both of political and financial decision-making and of the experiences and emotions of faculty, students, administrators, donors, and national politicians, I paint a vivid and resonant picture of the university campus as a key site for the transmission of norms around gender and sexuality.

I am currently working on an experimental intellectual history project about John Addington Symonds, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and trans-inclusive gay male histories; and on a book-length survey of British LGBTQ+ history 1820–present that explores the relationship between queer and trans life and the UK state. I also maintain an active interest in queer classical reception, am becoming increasingly interested in the history of the internet, and might someday write something about LGBTQ+ young people and the debates around the equalisation of the age of consent in late-twentieth-century Britain.

Publications

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Jump to: 2025 | 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2018 | 2017 | 2014

Number of items: 20.

2025

Rutherford, Samuel ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7292-5382 (2025) Contestations. In: A Cultural History of Higher Learning in the Age of Industry. Series: The cultural histories series. Bloomsbury: London. ISBN 9781350232204 (In Press)