Paul Renfro
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Paul Renfro is an associate professor of history and an affiliate faculty and advisory board member in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program. He is the author of two books: Stranger Danger: Family Values, Childhood, and the American Carceral State (Oxford University Press, 2020) and The Life and Death of Ryan White: AIDS and Inequality in America (University of North Carolina Press, 2024), which received an honorable mention in the general nonfiction category at the Florida Book Awards. Alongside Susan Eckelmann Berghel and Sara Fieldston, Renfro also coedited the anthology Growing Up America: Youth and Politics since 1945 (University of Georgia Press, 2019).
Renfro is currently writing two books. The first, titled Those Fearful Days, is a work of historical true-crime focused on the 1979–81 Atlanta youth murders, which claimed the lives of nearly thirty young, mostly poor and working-class African Americans in the self-proclaimed “city too busy to hate.” The second, The Passion of Matthew Shepard, situates Shepard’s life and 1998 murder within the broader history of the LGBTQ+ movement in the United States. Both books will be published by Liveright, a division of W. W. Norton & Company.
Renfro’s writing has appeared in TIME, the Washington Post, the New Republic, Slate, Dissent, Teen Vogue, and Jacobin, and he has been interviewed for stories in The Nation, the New Yorker, ELLE, Jezebel, Salon, and Mother Jones.
He is on sabbatical in Fall 2025.
