Department of Gender Studies

 Max Monegan is a PhD candidate in the Gender Studies Department at Indiana University, Bloomington and a 2026-27 Future Faculty Teaching Fellow in the departments of History and Race, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Butler University. He returned to academia after teaching high school history for seven years and his students have remained an inspiration to his teaching and research. He has been recognized for his teaching by GLSEN where he appeared on the Teacher of the Year Honor Roll in 2018, and by the IU Department of Gender Studies’ Barbara C. Gray Teaching Award. His academic interests include Gender Studies and Feminist Theory, The History of Gender & Sexuality, Gay, Lesbian & Trans Studies, 20th Century American History, Innovative Pedagogy, Queer Youth & Education, and Oral & Local Histories.

Max’s dissertation focuses on the inter-war Midwest as a crucial site for the construction of American normalcy and queerness, for which he has received the generous support of the William P. Heidrich Research Fellowship from the University of Michigan, and the Elmer L. Anderson Research Scholarship Award from the University of Minnesota, among others. He is also working on an oral history project, Children of the Corn, documenting the lived experiences of queer youth growing up in rural Ohio. He has presented portions of dissertation chapters and early work from Children of the Corn at several recent conferences including the American Studies Association, and the National Women’s Association conferences in 2025, as well as the American Historical Association and Organization of American Historians annual conferences in 2026. 

View Max Monegan's Curriculum Vitae

• “Anti-Modern Narratives and Queer Specters” as part of: The Queer Midwest: Its Histories and the Making of a Field, The Midwest History Association Annual Conference, April 2026.
• “They say ‘once you have had a woman, you will never want a man again.’: The Medical Surveillance and Policing of Homoaffective Women in Interwar America” as part of: Legal, Extralegal, Illegal and Otherwise: Policing Queerness in the Long Twentieth Century, Organization of American Historians Annual Conference, April 2026.
• “Queer Men on the Move: Sex, Transit, and the Inter-war Midwest” as part of: Complicating the Rural Queer Midwest: (Homo)Normalcy, Space, and Pleasure, American Historical Association Annual Conference, January 2016
• “Children of the Corn: Growing up Trans, Queer, and Non-Binary in Modern Rural Ohio” as part of: Margins of Empire?: Queer Understandings of Rural Place, Community, and (Un)Belonging, American Studies Association Annual Conference, November 2025
• “Children of the Corn: Queer Women in Modern Rural Ohio” as part of: We’re Still Here, and We Always Have Been: Sociability, Community, and Resistance in the Queer Midwest, National Women’s Studies Association Conference, November 2025