Charles Upchurch

Charles Upchurch received his B.A. in history from the University of North Carolina Greensboro (1991), M.A. in modern European history from the University of North Carolina Wilmington (1996), and Ph.D. in modern British history from Rutgers University (2003). Professor Upchurch’s research focuses on nineteenth-century British gender and social history, and his teaching fields include modern Britain, the British Empire, modern Europe, gender history, and the history of sexuality. His book, Before Wilde: Sex Between Men in Britain’s Age of Reform (University of California Press, 2009), explores the ways in which class influenced the interpretation of same-sex desire in the period when the British state first began to police sex between men on a regular basis. It is the first work to call attention to the widespread reporting of court cases related to sex between men in mainstream London newspapers between 1820 and 1870. It also places family reactions at the center of the narrative, in order to better understand how these acts were understood within the broader culture. While continuing to work in the areas of gender and sexuality, Professor Upchurch is also researching a book that investigates the ways in which working- and middle-class individuals appropriated aspects of the work of Adam Smith for socially progressive ends in the decades before the major publications of Karl Marx. Professor Upchurch has previously published on cross-dressers and British society in the 1870s. His work has appeared in Gender and History, The Journal of British Studies, Victorian Studies, and other scholarly journals.