Tamara Chaplin PhD

Tamara Chaplin is Professor of Modern European History and Lynn M. Martin Professorial Scholar at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. A historian of contemporary France with specializations in gender and sexuality, media history, and queer theory, Chaplin is affiliated with the Departments of Gender and Women’s Studies, French and Italian, Global Studies, the European Union Center, the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory and the initiative on Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies. Her recent book, Becoming Lesbian: A Queer History of Modern France (University of Chicago Press, 2024), a landmark analysis of how a marginalized subculture used the modern media to transform public attitudes toward sexual desire, was completed with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Camargo Foundation, and UIUC’s Center for Advanced Study. Chaplin's first monograph Turning On the Mind: French Philosophers on Television (University of Chicago Press, 2007) examined the relationship between TV, high culture, and French national identity. Her scholarship has appeared in the Journal of the History of Sexuality, French Historical Studies, the Journal of the History of Ideas, and in edited collections in French and English on youth sexuality, May ’68, Michel Foucault, and second wave feminism. A governing member of the Western Society for French History and past board member of the American Historical Association’s Committee on LGBT History, Chaplin also serves on the Comité Scientifique for the Société Pour l’Histoire des Médias (Paris, France). She published a co-edited volume (with Jadwiga E. Pieper- Mooney), The Global Sixties: Conventions, Contests, and Countercultures (Routledge Press, 2017). 

Recipient of the highest teaching awards delivered at the University of Illinois—both the Provost's Campus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching and the LAS Dean's Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching—Dr. Chaplin teaches survey and special topics courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels on modern Europe, France, sexuality, human rights, history and social theory, World War I, media and popular culture. A former professional ballet dancer, trained actor and member of the Screen Actor’s Guild, Dr. Chaplin received her doctorate in Modern European History from Rutgers University and her BA from Concordia University (Montreal).