Research Interests for Gabriel N. Rosenberg

Gabriel Rosenberg's research investigates the historical and contemporary linkages among gender, sexuality, and the global food system. In particular, he studies spaces of agricultural production as important sites for the constitution and governance of intimacy – intimacy both between and among humans, animals, and plants. Although central throughout history to human knowledge about reproduction, agriculture has been peripheral to accounts of the governance of sexuality. In tandem, while historical accounts of American state power have productively questioned matters of governance through the lens of agriculture, they have largely overlooked sexuality as its own formative analytic. His research looks to agriculture as a site of knowledge/power formation that inscribes and mobilizes both human and non-human bodies and desire. Reflecting his training as a historian of the modern United States, he uses the archives of the America’s agricultural past to exhume the tangled relationships between agricultural practices and the governance of human gender and sexuality, a relationship that now conditions America’s relationship to the agricultural peripheries of the global South.

Keywords:

Agriculture, Animals, Bioethics, Environment, Food, Gender, History, Modern, Life sciences, Livestock, Queer Theory, queer theory, Reproductive technology, Sexuality

Current projects:

The 4-H Harvest: Sexuality and the State in Rural America

Purebred: Making Meat and Eugenics in the Modern United States

Areas of Interest:

modern US History
history of gender and sexuality
mass culture
political economy of food, agriculture, and the environment
childhood studies
animal studies
queer theory
biopolitical theory.

Recent Publications

1. Rosenberg, G; Dutkiewicz, J, Feed the People!: Why Industrial Food is Good and How We Can Make It Better (January, 2026), Basic Books
2. Rosenberg, G; Fischel, J, Hot Dog Sex: Animal Welfare and the Failure of Bestiality Law, in Sodomy's Solicitations: A Right to Queerness (June, 2025), pp. 114-143, Temple University Press
3. Animal Mobilities, Osiris, vol. 20 no. 1 (June, 2025), The University of Chicago Press
4. Rosenberg, G; Novick, T; Onaga, L, Knowing Animals, Moving Animals, Osiris, vol. 20 no. 1 (June, Submitted, 2025), pp. 1-15, The University of Chicago Press
5. Rosenberg, G, Republicans’ Revealing Fetish for A.I.-Enhanced Trump and Vance Pics, NEW REPUBLIC (October, 2024), The Republic Pub.