Joseph Plaster
Welcome. I am curator in public humanities and director of the Tabb Center at Johns Hopkins University. In this capacity, I cultivate an exchange of knowledge between the university and greater Baltimore region through participatory action research, oral history, performance, and undergraduate courses taught through the Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. My research and teaching combine archival, oral history, and public humanities methods to examine the world-making practices of marginalized publics in the United States, with a focus on intersections of gender, sexuality, and race.
I am the author of Kids on the Street: Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco’s Tenderloin (Feb 2023, Duke University Press) which explores the informal support networks that enabled abandoned and runaway queer youth to survive in tenderloin districts across the United States, and San Francisco's Tenderloin
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in particular. Drawing on archival, ethnographic, oral history, and public humanities research to outline the kinship networks, religious practices, storytelling traditions, and migratory patterns that allowed kids to foster mutual aid. By highlighting a politics where the marginal position of street kids is the basis for a moral economy of reciprocity, My academic writing has appeared in Radical History Review, The Public Historian, The Abusable Past, Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies, and will appear in a forthcoming issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.
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My public humanities projects bring together a wide array of publics as partners in research and education. The Peabody Ballroom Experience is a collaboration between Johns Hopkins University and the artists and activists who make up Baltimore’s ballroom scene. The project won the National Council on Public History Outstanding Project Award in 2023. Additionally, I am on the faculty team of Inheritance Baltimore: Humanities and Arts Education for Black Liberation and was awarded the American Historical Association’s Allan Bérubé Prize for Polk Street: Lives in Transition, a project that drew on original oral histories to intervene in debates about gentrification, homelessness, queer politics, and public safety in the polarized setting of gentrifying San Francisco.
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I completed my PhD in American Studies at Yale University with a Certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
