Caroline Radesky, visiting assistant professor in the University of Iowa Iowa Department of History, received the Organization of American Historians' 2020 John D'Emilio LGBTQ History Dissertation Award. The award is given annually for the best PhD dissertation in U.S. LGBTQ history.

Radesky completed her dissertation, “Feeling Historical: Same-Sex Desire and Historical Imaginaries, 1880–1920," at the UI under the direction of Leslie Schwalm.

The dissertation focuses on the ways that elite white individuals in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century took to justifying and glorifying their same-sex attractions by creating a particular kind of queer history. Analyzing a range of innovative sources, including photographs, fiction, catalogs of personal libraries, creative productions, and the archiving of lovers’ lives, she shows how a whitewashed history of ancient Greece and, for men, the Middle East, served as the foundation for an imagined history that made same-sex desires natural and noble. The queer history fashioned in response to and in dialogue with the emerging discourse of sexology became central to elite white conceptions of what it meant to be same-sex desiring.