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. Currently titled Before Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: Homosexuality, Race, and Contagion in the U.S. Military, 1941-1993, the manuscript is under contract with the University of North Carolina Press. Dr. Shibley is also co-editor, with Dorothy Roberts and Eram Alam, of Ordering the Human: The Global Spread of Racial Science (Columbia University Press, 2024).

Dr. Shibley’s article, “Policing Venereal Disease at Fort Huachuca, 1941-1945,” which appeared in the Journal of Military History, won the 2025 Prize for an Article or Essay from the Society for History in the Federal Government and the 2025 Nupur Chaudhuri First Article Prize from the Coordinating Council for Women in History. In 2018, she 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.” 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, among other sources.

Dr. Shibley is currently a Henry A. Kissinger Visiting Scholars Associate Research Scholar in the Johnson Center for the Study of American Diplomacy in the Jackson School of Global Affairs at Yale University. She has taught courses in history, science and technology studies, and gender and sexuality studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Wesleyan University, and Northeastern University. 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 one of the editors of Nursing Clio, which won the 2025 George Rosen Prize from the American Association for the History of Medicine. She was an elected Governing Board member of the Committee on LGBT History (since renamed the LGBTQ+ History Association) from 2021-2023.

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.