Jen Manion

The Organization of American Historians named Manion a Distinguished Lecturer in 2018. Manion is an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society and the Massachusetts Historical Society as well as an active member of the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. Jen has received numerous grants and awards including funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium, and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies Dissertation Fellowship. Jen serves on the editorial board of University of North Carolina Press Gender and American Culture Series and recently completed terms on the editorial boards of The William and Mary Quarterly, Early American Studies, and Amherst College Press.

Before joining Amherst College in 2016, Manion was the Founding Director of the LGBTQ Resource Center at Connecticut College and taught in the history department from 2006-2016. Jen received a PhD in history from Rutgers University and a BA in history with an English minor from the University of Pennsylvania, magna cum laude. Female Husband to Jessica Halem.

• Good Morning America, “Murray Hill is ready for drag kings to have moment,” 2023
• Smithsonian Magazine, “First Self-Proclaimed Drag Queen Formerly Enslaved,” 2023
• Good Housekeeping, “Meet the heroes of the Stonewall Riots,” 2023
• Boston Globe, “Is ‘ladies’ a microaggression?” 2023
• New York Times, “Transgender Americans Feel Under Siege,” 2022
• Philadelphia Inquirer, “Report: Inventing Solitary,” 2022
• Boston Globe, “The debate over gender pronouns in schools,” 2021
• Guardian, “Think being trans is a ‘trend’? Consider 18th-century ‘female husbands’,” 2021
• ABC News, “Why the LGBTQ community sidelined police for Pride,” 2021
• BBC History Extra, “The Big Questions of LGBTQ History,” 2021
• BBC History Extra, “What are the challenges of telling LGBTQ history?” 2021
• The New Yorker, “The Gay Marriages of a 19th c Prison Ship,” 2020
• AHA Perspectives, “Singular They: Nonbinary Language in the Historical Community,” 2020
• New Now Next, “11 Queer Books we can’t wait to read this spring,” 2020
• LGBTQ Nation, “James Allen was declared a Female Husband,” 2020
• Chicago Tribune, “He, she or they: Companies address calls for a gender-neutral workplace,” 2019
• Boston Globe, “The quickly shifting language of the transgender community,” 2014