Jules Gill-Peterson

Jules Gill-Peterson is a Canadian historian specializing in transgender history. She is an associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University. Her work focuses on how science, medicine, and race inform transgender embodiment. Her best-known work is Histories of the Transgender Child, which documents the 20th-century history of transgender childhood in the United States and received the 2019 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction. She is a general co-editor of Transgender Studies Quarterly, and was previously a research fellow at the American Council of Learned Societies and at the Kinsey Institute.

Education and career Peterson earned a bachelor's degree in history from the University of Ottawa in 2010 and received a PhD in American studies from Rutgers University in 2015. She was advised by Frances Bartkowski for her dissertation Queer Theory is Kid Stuff: A Genealogy of the Gay and Transgender Child.

In 2020, she received a Chancellor’s Distinguished Research Award from the University of Pittsburgh, where she previously served as a faculty member.