Jonathan Bell awarded a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship

6 December 2021

The Institute of the Americas is delighted to announce that Professor Jonathan Bell has been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship. This two-year award will enable Professor Bell to work on his new project 'The Health Care Closet: Sexual Politics and American Health, 1965-1995'

Professor Bell says: 'What impact did the lack of universal health care have on the sexual revolutions in the United States of the post-1960s era? My book project seeks to understand how the development of a valorised private sector in health care financing interacted with a limited and parsimonious welfare system predicated on categories of ‘deserving’ poor to shape the ways in which sexual minorities saw themselves – and each other – as political subjects. The sexual liberation movements of the late twentieth century, both in the US and elsewhere, were centred on sexual and bodily autonomy, but the US was distinctive in its reliance on a health care marketplace to realise full sexual citizenship. As a result, the sexual awakenings and rights revolutions of the 1960s-1970s created their own class dynamics and interacted with both state and private interests in ways that remain poorly understood.

My book explores the relationship between sexuality and the politics of the US’s hybrid public-private health care system from the end of the 1960s to the 1990s. Alongside the inequalities in access to health care intrinsic to such a system, I analyse how it shaped the formation of sexual identities and connected to larger understandings of political economy and society in ways distinct from other polities with publicly-funded health care and more generous social safety nets. Sexual minorities demanded health care rights at the point both public and private social safety nets in the US were coming under strain as part of what is now understood as a ‘neoliberal’ turn in global political economy. My consideration of an emerging crisis in health care access through the lens of sex and gender therefore offers insights into the impact of market economics on sexual identity and activism at a critical point in the reshaping of the global political economy.'

Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowships are awarded to distinguished researchers in the humanities and social sciences to complete a piece of original research and facilitate this by the provision of teaching replacement. For more information about the Trust, please visit www.leverhulme.ac.uk and follow the Trust on Twitter @LeverhulmeTrust. For information about Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowships, please consult https://www.leverhulme.ac.uk/major-research-fellowships

Professor Jonathan Bell is a historian of US politics, with a particular emphasis on American liberalism since the New Deal and the ways in which liberal politics have adapted to social change during the twentieth century. He has published widely in US political history, including a book on how the Cold War transformed American political discourse and policy formation on domestic issues during the Truman Presidency, a collection of essays on American liberalism, and a book charting the changing political complexion of California since World War Two. He is Professor of US History and Director of the Institute of the Americas, University College London.

Links:

Professor Jonathan Bell - academic profile

Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowships scheme

The Leverhulme Trust website

@LeverhulmeTrust Twitter account

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