Katie Sutton

Biography

Katie Sutton is Associate Professor of German and Gender Studies at the Australian National University, Australia in the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics. Sutton’s primary research is as a cultural historian of the German-speaking world working at the intersection of gender, sexuality, medicine and popular culture, with particular expertise in queer and trans history, and histories of sexual science and psychoanalysis. They are the author of Sexuality in Modern History (Bloomsbury, 2023); Sex between Body and Mind: Psychoanalysis and Sexology in the German-Speaking World, 1890s-1930s (University of Michigan Press, 2019) and The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany (Berghahn Books, 2011), as well as more than twenty book chapters and peer-reviewed journal articles. Sutton’s work has played a pioneering role in exploring German queer and gender-diverse histories and cultures using sources ranging from late nineteenth-century medicine to contemporary German literature and has been influential in shifting dominant narratives in the history of sexuality and medical humanities by challenging the widely assumed split between sexology and psychoanalysis as two key new fields of medical-scientific inquiry from the late-19th century.

Sutton’s work has received international awards from organizations including Women in German (Best Article 2022; Best Dissertation 2009) and the German Studies Association/German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and been supported by major grants and fellowship from the Australian Research Council, DAAD and British Academy/Leverhulme. Sutton’s commitment to collaborative research is demonstrated by a wide range of co-authored articles and co-edited special issues of journals including Gender and History, History of the Human Sciences and Radical History Review. Sutton is currently working on a collaborative ARC Discovery Project with Professor Birgit Lang at the University of Melbourne on photography and film in early sexual science. Public engagement activities include a major 2024 exhibition on TransTrans: Transnational trans histories at the Victorian Pride Centre (Sep-Nov), events at the German Historical Museum, New York Jewish Museum and Chicago Dank Haus, and public humanities work with outlets including BBC3 Radio, Der Spiegel, All About History and the New Yorker.