Biography
I am a social and political historian of the Holocaust, the Weimar Republic, and Nazi Germany. My work has been influential in international discussions of Nazism. I am also an expert in LGBTQ history, and helped to draft an amicus brief for the Supreme Court case US. v. Skrmetti that was joined by the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and others.
My second book, Racism and the Making of Gay Rights: A Sexologist, his Student, and the Empire of Queer Love chronicles the 1931 world journey of Li Shiu Tong and Magnus Hirschfeld. It is the first extended examination of Li's life and of his own sexology, which conflicted with that of Hirschfeld, his mentor and boyfriend. A 2023 Choice Outstanding Academic Title, it was short-listed for the Glasscock Book Prize (2023).
Sex and the Weimar Republic: German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis (2015) reexamines the gay and trans rights movements of the 1920s, which were the world's first, and asks what they had to do with fascism. I also write for the national and international press on things like the queer Asian Canadian sexologist who played a key role in early gay rights, the gay Nazi Hitler had murdered, trans women in Nazi Germany, neo-Nazism, queer fascism, and the history of AIDS. If you're interested, Ben Miller's interview on Bad Gays is a good overview of some of my work.
Current projects include a book on queer and trans Jews as well as other sex and gender "criminals" under the Nazi State and in the Holocaust, a book on transness and the theory of history, and Trans Berlin, on the fabulous trans people of 1920s Berlin and their struggle to create a transgender world.
I'm affiliated with the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies (check out the Jewish Questions podcast), the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies, and the Department of Germanics. I co-teach on the global history of AIDS with Lynn M. Thomas.
*Not accepting grad students as main advisor, 2025-6 cycle.
Research
Selected Research
- Marhoefer, Laurie (2023). Transgender Life and Persecution under the Nazi State: Gutachten on the Vollbrecht Case. Central European History, 1-7. doi:10.1017/S0008938923000468
- Marhoefer, Laurie. Racism and the Making of Gay Rights: A Sexologist, His Student, and the Empire of Queer Love. University of Toronto Press, 2022. Print.
- “Wurden lesbische Frauen im Nationalsozialismus verfolgt? Mikrogeschichte und der Begriff der “Verfolgtengruppe.” Invertito: Jarbuch für die Geschichte der Homosexualitäten Rüdiger Lautmann and Stefan Micheler, eds. (2019)
- "Was the Homosexual Made White? Race, Empire, and Analogy in Gay and Trans Thought in Twentieth-Century Germany," Gender and History (March 2019)
- "Why the Myth of the Gay Nazi is Back in Circulation" Slate 24 August 2018
- "Queer Fascism and the End of Gay History," blog post, Notches (June 2018)
- “Lesbianism, Transvestitism, and the Nazi State: A Microhistory of a Gestapo Investigation, 1939-1943.” The American Historical Review 121:4 (2016): 1167-1195.
- “‘The book was a revelation, I recognized myself in it’: Lesbian Sexuality, Censorship, and the Queer Press in Weimar-era Germany.” Journal of Women’s History 27:2 (2015): 62-86.
- Marhoefer, Laurie. Sex and the Weimar Republic: German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015. Print.
- “Homosexuality and Theories of Culture.” In Was ist Homosexualität? Forschungsgeschichte, gesellschaftliche Entwicklungen und Perspektiven, edited by Jennifer V. Evans, Florian Mildenberger, Rüdiger Lautmann, Jakob Pastötter. Hamburg: Männerschwarm, 2014: 255-269.
- “Degeneration, Sexual Freedom, and the Politics of the Weimar Republic, 1918-1933.” German Studies Review 34 No. 3 (2011): 529-550.
Courses Taught
Autumn 2025
Winter 2025
Winter 2024
Autumn 2023
Winter 2023
Spring 2022
Winter 2022
Graduate Study Areas
A note to prospective graduate students: I will not be accepting new students as primary advisor for the 2022-23 academic year.
Division: Europe--Medieval to Modern Times
Students preparing this field with Professor Marhoefer will study the social, cultural, and political history of Germany, German-speaking Europe, and Germany’s global colonial empire from the late eighteenth century to the present.
Division: Comparative History--Comparative Gender & Comparative Ethnicity and Nationalism
A field in comparative gender directed by Professor Marhoefer will examine the transnational histories of gender and sexuality, as well as the closely related histories of class, race, and empire, especially within modern Europe and its colonies.