# Joseph Plaster

Joseph Plaster is an interdisciplinary scholar specializing in queer studies and public humanities, with teaching and research fields at the intersections of U.S. 20th century urban history, oral history, performance studies, public history, and LGBTQ studies of religion. He is a Lecturer in the Program in Museums and Society and Director of the Winston Tabb Special Collections Research Center at Johns Hopkins University. He serves on the faculty board of the Johns Hopkins University Alexander Grass Humanities Institute and the advisory board of OutHistory.

## Education

Plaster earned a PhD in American Studies from Yale University in 2018.

## Publications

Plaster is author of Kids on the Street: Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco's Tenderloin, which received the 2024 Joe William Trotter Jr. Book Prize for Best First Book in Urban History, presented by the Urban History Association, the 2024 Oral History Association Book Award, and the 2024 Randy Shilts Award, presented by The Publishing Triangle.
Kids on the Street examines the informal social networks that helped abandoned and runaway queer youth survive in the Tenderloin district from the 1950s to the present. Through archival research, oral histories, and public humanities methods, Plaster uncovers how these youth created kinship systems and practiced mutual aid in precarious circumstances. The book highlights their resilience and creativity in the face of social trauma, offering a counter-narrative to dominant LGBTQ histories focused on progress and pride. The book also critiques neoliberal urban development and its impact on these marginalized communities while celebrating their collective strategies of survival and memory-making.
Plaster's article, "‘Homosexuals in Adolescent Rebellion:’ Central City Uprisings during the Long Sixties," published in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies in April 2023, received an honorable mention for the 2024 Audre Lorde Prize for outstanding work in LGBTQ history. Additional essays include “Safe for Whom? And Whose Families?” (The Public Historian, August 2020) and “Imagined Conversations and Activist Lineages” (Radical History Review, May 2012).

## Public Humanities

Plaster directed several public humanities projects, including the Peabody Ballroom Experience, a collaboration between Johns Hopkins University and Baltimore's ballroom scene. Plaster brought together students, faculty, staff, and artists to record more than a dozen oral history interviews; archive ballroom ephemera; co-teach undergraduate courses; produce documentary films; organize vogue workshops; and stage ball competitions at the George Peabody Library. The project won the National Council on Public History’s 2023 Outstanding Project Award
Plaster is director of the Winston Tabb Special Collections Research Center at Johns Hopkins University, which "advances experimental and participatory research methods, public humanities scholarship, and collaborative approaches to knowledge creation that engage the distinctive collections and archives of the Sheridan Libraries & University Museums."
Plaster directed the San Francisco ACT UP Oral History Project in 2017 and 2018 in an effort to chronicle San Francisco’s AIDS direct action movement. He recorded and archived oral histories with ACT UP veterans; developed an exhibition at the GLBT History Museum; and created a multimedia Internet presence. The oral history recordings, include an oral history with Crystal Mason, an AIDS activist who worked with the direct-action group ACT UP/ San Francisco in the early 1990s.
From 2010-2011, Plaster directed Vanguard Revisited, a public history project through which homeless LGBTQ youth documented and interpreted the legacy of 1960s street youth organizing. Outcomes included youth-produced historical magazine; historical walking tours; street theater reenactments; intergenerational discussion groups; national speaking tour of GLBT homeless youth shelters and faith communities. The Vanguard Revisited zine is archived by the Digital Transgender Archive.
From 2007-2009, Plaster directed Polk Street: Lives in Transition, which interpreted oral histories and archival research in an effort to shape debates about gentrification and public safety on San Francisco’s Polk Street. Outcomes included a multimedia exhibit; professionally mediated neighborhood dialogues; oral history “listening parties” and other public events; hour-long radio documentary distributed nationally via NPR. The project was awarded the Allan Bérubé Prize for outstanding work in public GLBT history in 2010.