WOMEN’S, GENDER, AND SEXUALITY STUDIES
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Susanne M. Klausen

Susanne M. Klausen

Brill Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
333 Willard Building
smk6602@psu.edu
Photo of Susanne M. Klausen

Professional Bio

Susanne M. Klausen received her doctoral degree in history from Queen’s University, Canada. Her research and teaching interests include the politics of fertility in Southern Africa, nationalism and sexuality, and transnational movements for women’s reproductive rights and justice. She is the author of Race, Maternity, and the Politics of Birth Control in South Africa, 1910-1939 (Palgrave Macmillan 2004) and Abortion Under Apartheid: Nationalism, Sexuality, and Women’s Reproductive Rights in South Africa (Oxford University Press 2015), and has published articles in the American Historical Review, Journal of Women’s History, Journal of Southern African Studies, Journal of South African History, Medical History, New Zealand Journal of History, and the Canadian Bulletin of Medical History/Bulletin canadien d'histoire de la médecine. She is currently completing a monograph on the South African Immorality (Amendment) Act (1950) that criminalized sexual contact between heterosexual whites and people of color titled Criminal Desire: Nationalism, Gender, and Interracial (Hetero)Sex in Apartheid South Africa.

In 2024 Klausen was appointed Extraordinary Professor at The Centre for the Study of the Afterlife of Violence and the Reparative Quest (AVReQ) at Stellenbosch University. She is also Senior Research Associate in the Faculty of Humanities at University of Johannesburg and Adjunct Research Professor in the Department of History at Carleton University, Ottawa.

Recent Publications

"'Do You Call Yourself a White Man?' Nationalism, Criminalization of Interracial Sex, and the Policing of White Male (Hetero)sexuality in South Africa during Apartheid," American Historical Review, vol. 127, no. 1 (2022): 159–93.

 

Abortion Under Apartheid: Nationalism, Sexuality, and Women's Reproductive Rights in South Africa (2015)

Winner of the Women’s History Prize awarded by the Canadian Committee on Women’s History (2016) and the Joel Gregory Prize awarded by the Canadian Association of African Studies (2016), and a finalist for the Wallace Ferguson Prize 2016 by the Canadian Historical Association for best scholarly book on a non-Canadian topic.