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.

My current research includes two distinct strands. One is an experimental, book-length intellectual history project about the life and work of the American queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950–2009). The other, focused on trans everyday life in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Scotland, undergirds an ongoing programme of community partnerships and co-created research by, with, and for Glasgow's trans community. You can read more about my approach to teaching trans history in community here.

Publications

List by: Type | Date

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

Number of items: 21.

2025

Rutherford, Samuel ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7292-5382 (2025) Contestations. In: de Coninck-Smith, Ning, Horne, Julia and Whyte, William (eds.) A Cultural History of Higher Learning in the Age of Industry. Series: The cultural histories series, 5. Bloomsbury: London. ISBN 9781350232204

Rutherford, Sam ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7292-5382 (2025) Before Gender: Lost stories from trans history 1850–1950: by Eli Erlick, 2025, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 268pp., £20.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-5261-9271-4. Women's History Review, (doi: 10.1080/09612025.2025.2549861)[Book Review] (Early Online Publication)

Rutherford, Samuel ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7292-5382 (2025) Teaching Gender: The British University and the Rise of Heterosexuality, 1860-1939. Oxford University Press: Oxford. ISBN 9780198937494 (doi: 10.1093/9780198937524.001.0001)

2024

Rutherford, Samuel ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7292-5382 (2024) Ren Pepitone, Brotherhood of Barristers: A Cultural History of the British Legal Profession, 1840–1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024. xviii + 216pp. 9 figures. Bibliography. £85.00 hbk. Urban History, (doi: 10.1017/S0963926824000634)[Book Review] (Early Online Publication)

Rutherford, Samuel ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7292-5382 (2024) Jacob Bloomfield. Drag: A British History Berkeley Series in British Studies. Oakland: University of California Press, 2023. Pp. 272. $29.95 (cloth). Journal of British Studies, (doi: 10.1017/jbr.2024.47)[Book Review] (Early Online Publication)

Rutherford, Samuel ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7292-5382 (2024) The Queerness of Everyday Life: The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Domesticity after World War II. Stephen Vider. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. iv + 300 pp. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 30(2), pp. 260-262. (doi: 10.1215/10642684-11029014)[Book Review]

2023

Rutherford, Samuel ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7292-5382 (2023) LGBT Victorians: sexuality and gender in the nineteenth-century archives by Simon Joyce, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2022, xi + 284 pp., £75.00 (hardback), ISBN-13: 978-0-192-858399. Social History, 48(4), pp. 503-505. (doi: 10.1080/03071022.2023.2257101)[Book Review]

Rutherford, Samuel ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7292-5382 (2023) The Culture of Male Beauty in Britain: From the First Photographs to David Beckham. Cultural and Social History, 20(2), pp. 303-305. (doi: 10.1080/14780038.2023.2189419)[Book Review]

2022

Rutherford, Samuel ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7292-5382 (2022) Precarious Professionals: Gender, Identities and Social Change in Modern Britain. Cultural and Social History, 19(5), pp. 626-628. (doi: 10.1080/14780038.2022.2148617)[Book Review]

Rutherford, Samuel ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7292-5382 (2022) Student Consumer Culture in Nineteenth-Century Oxford by Sabine Chaouche. Victorian Studies, 64(3), pp. 478-479. (doi: 10.2979/victorianstudies.64.3.16)[Book Review]

2021

Rutherford, Samuel ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7292-5382 (2021) Female husbands: a trans history, by Jen Manion. English Historical Review, 136(583), pp. 1657-1659. (doi: 10.1093/ehr/ceab221)[Book Review]

Rutherford, Samuel ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7292-5382 (2021) Researching and teaching with British newsreels. Twentieth Century British History, 32(3), pp. 441-461. (doi: 10.1093/tcbh/hwab014)

Rutherford, Samuel ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7292-5382 (2021) From Sodomy Laws to Same-Sex Marriage: International Perspectives since 1789, ed. Sean Brady and Mark Seymour. English Historical Review, 136(581), pp. 1109-1111. (doi: 10.1093/ehr/ceab151)[Book Review]

2020

Rutherford, Samuel ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7292-5382 (2020) Masculine Plural: Queer Classics, Sex, and Education, by Jennifer Ingleheart. English Historical Review, 135(572), pp. 234-236. (doi: 10.1093/ehr/cez419)[Book Review]

2018

Rutherford, Samuel ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7292-5382 (2018) Redbrick: A Social and Architectural History of Britain’s Civic Universities. By William Whyte. Twentieth Century British History, 29(2), pp. 320-322. (doi: 10.1093/tcbh/hwx030)[Book Review]

Rutherford, Samuel ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7292-5382 (2018) Historians and the Church of England: Religion and Historical Scholarship, 1870–1920 by James Kirby. Victorian Studies, 60(2), pp. 294-296. (doi: 10.2979/victorianstudies.60.2.18)[Book Review]

2017

Rutherford, Samuel ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7292-5382 (2017) Natalie Thomlinson . Race, Ethnicity and the Women's Movement in England, 1968–1993. Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Pp. 272. $100.00 (cloth). Journal of British Studies, 56(4), pp. 932-933. (doi: 10.1017/jbr.2017.174)[Book Review]

Rutherford, Samuel ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7292-5382 (2017) Picturing the Closet: Male Secrecy and Homosexual Visibility in Britain, by Dominic Janes. English Historical Review, 132(555), pp. 427-429. (doi: 10.1093/ehr/cex035)[Book Review]

Rutherford, Samuel ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7292-5382 (2017) Arthur Sidgwick's Greek prose composition: gender, affect, and sociability in the late-Victorian university. Journal of British Studies, 56(1), pp. 91-116. (doi: 10.1017/jbr.2016.116)

2014

Rutherford, Samuel ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7292-5382 (2014) Impossible love and Victorian values: J. A. Symonds and the intellectual history of homosexuality. Journal of the History of Ideas, 75(4), pp. 605-627. (doi: 10.1353/jhi.2014.0028) (PMID:27424233)

Rutherford, Samuel ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7292-5382 (2014) Kate Fisher and Sarah Toulalan (eds.), Bodies, Sex and Desire from the Renaissance to the Present. Sexualities, 17(3), pp. 365-366. (doi: 10.1177/1363460714528090)[Book Review]

This list was generated on Wed Aug 26 19:33:59 2026 BST.

Jump to: Articles | Books | Book Sections | Book Reviews

Number of items: 21.

Articles

Books

Book Sections

Book Reviews

This list was generated on Wed Aug 26 19:33:59 2026 BST.

Supervision

I enjoy receiving enquiries from prospective PhD candidates, but unfortunately I am currently at capacity and not able to take on new PhD supervisions for autumn 2027 entry.

When not at capacity, I welcome proposals for projects in nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and Irish LGBTQ+ history, or that otherwise align closely with the research interests mentioned above (for example, projects in the politics of gender in early-twentieth-century Britain, queer intellectual history, or the history of higher education). With appropriate co-supervision, I may be able to supervise projects in British imperial, continental European, or North American LGBTQ+ history, or projects in interdisciplinary queer and trans studies.

If getting in touch to enquire about supervision, please include a draft proposal that follows the guidance under 'Research outline' on the History PhD admissions page. There is more information about funding here, but please be aware that opportunities to pursue a funded PhD in the Humanities at Glasgow are woefully limited.

I currently supervise or co-supervise the following projects:

Fred Morrish, '"Dr Randell gave me a choice — man or woman?": Transgender community, subjectivity, and medicalisation in Britain, 1966–1992'
Poppy Watson, '"Only Gays in the Village are the Gay Gordons": An Oral History of Growing Up Queer in the Scottish Highlands and the Queer Highland Diaspora'
A. Ivan Sanchez Hervas, 'Corrected Registry Entries and the Diagnosis of Sex at Birth'
Ashley Brown, 'Fraternity, feuds, and the academic bubble: Masculinities at Scotland’s universities between 1560-1606'
Lou Hindle, 'Trans Outings as Gendered Social Violence in the Nineteenth-Century American West'
Mercury Natis (English Literature), 'Queer masculinity and male intimacy in Tolkien’s Legendarium: Context, Text, Readership'
Peter White, 'The History of Women’s and Gender Studies: 1968 - Present'

Brown, Ashley
Fraternity, feuds, and the academic bubble: Masculinities at Scotland’s universities between 1560-1606
Sanchez Hervas, Ivana
Corrected Registry Entries and the Diagnosis of Sex at Birth

Teaching

Honours

History of Queer Ideas (special subject)
British LGBTQ+ History
Becoming a Historian (Junior Honours core course)

PGT

Approaches to Queer and Trans Histories
Gender, Politics and Power (MSc Gender History core course)
I convene the MSc Gender History. You can read more about the programme here, and about studying on the programme via distance learning here.

Sam Rutherford

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School of Humanities | Sgoil nan Daonnachdan