Chad Heap’s work examines the relationship between sexuality and the city in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He is particularly interested in how urban culture and space helped shape Americans’ understanding of sexual practices and identities and contributed to the emergence of new sexual communities. His broad teaching and research interests include the study of sexuality, gender and American culture, and U.S. social, cultural and urban history.
Prof. Heap’s first book, Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885-1940 (University of Chicago Press, 2009), shows how this distinctive cultural practice transformed the popular conceptualization of racial and sexual difference in turn-of-the-century U.S. cities. He argues that slumming not only created spaces where affluent whites could cross preconceived racial and sexual boundaries but also contributed significantly to the emergence and codification of a new twentieth-century hegemonic social order—one that was structured primarily around an increasingly polarized white/black racial axis and a hetero/homo sexual binary that were defined in reciprocal relationship to one another.
Currently, he is working on two new book-length research projects. The first is a reconstructed ethnography of Depression-era gay Chicago, based on roughly forty life histories and other field notes gathered during the latter half of the 1930s by a sociology graduate student at the University of Chicago. The second, tentatively entitled, A Dangerous Subject to Study, is a history of the making of sexual knowledge in Chicago—from the blossoming of American sexology in the late nineteenth century to the so-called Chicago school of sociology’s pioneering (yet largely unpublished) studies of homosexuality, prostitution, and other non-normative sexual practices.
Prof. Heap teaches graduate seminars on gender, sexuality and American culture in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His undergraduate courses include “Sexuality in U.S. History,” “Washington Sex Scandals,” and a research seminar on “Nighttime in America.”
He received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago in 2000 and was the recipient of a Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellowship from the Newberry Library in Chicago, as well as a Sexuality Research Dissertation Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council with funds provided by the Ford Foundation. He has also been a visiting scholar at New York University’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.
Principal Publications
Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885-1940. Historical Studies of Urban America, edited by Timothy J. Gilfoyle, James R. Grossman, and Becky Nicolaides. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.
“The City as a Sexual Laboratory: The Queer Heritage of the Chicago School.” Qualitative Sociology 26 (Winter 2003): 457-487.
Homosexuality in the City: A Century of Research at the University of Chicago, exhibition catalogue. Chicago: University of Chicago Library, 2000.
Featured Media Appearances
Chad Heap’s Slumming was the featured topic for the May 20, 2009 broadcast of BBC Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed, hosted by Laurie Taylor. Go to: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00kfgcv
Prof. Heap participated in a discussion about “Sexuality and the City” on the November 22, 2004 broadcast of Chicago Public Radio’s Odyssey, hosted by Gretchen Helfrich. Go to: http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/audio_library/od_ranov04.asp
Link to Prof. Heap's CV
