About

Natalie Shibley is a historian writing a manuscript about race, homosexuality investigations, and notions of disease in the U.S. military from the 1940s to 1990s. Her research has been supported by the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, the U.S. Army Military History Institute, the Schlesinger Library, Cornell University Library, and the University of Pennsylvania Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies program, among other sources. In 2018, Dr. Shibley won the Du Bois-Wells Graduate Student Paper Prize from the African American Intellectual History Society for her paper, “‘Not fit material for anyone to print’: Race, Respectability, and Military Homosexuality Investigations, 1945-1950.”

Dr. Shibley is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Northeastern University. She has also taught courses in history, science and technology studies, and gender and sexuality studies at Wesleyan University and the University of Pennsylvania. She was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Program on Race, Science, and Society at Penn and an Affiliate Postdoctoral Fellow of the Penn Medicine and the Afterlives of Slavery project. She co-organized the 2019 “Penn and Slavery” Symposium, which brought together scholars, students, and community members to discuss Penn’s relationship to the institution of slavery and its legacies. She has also been a member of the New-York Historical Society Center for Women’s History Early Career Workshop and participated in an NEH Summer Institute, “Digital Methods for Military History.” Dr. Shibley is on the Governing Board of the Committee on LGBT History for 2021-2023 and is one of the editors of Nursing Clio.

Dr. Shibley earned a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, where she was the first recipient of a joint doctoral degree in Africana Studies and History. She also earned an MA from Penn and a BA from Columbia University.