{"id":2000,"date":"2019-05-13T12:14:48","date_gmt":"2019-05-13T16:14:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/museums-society\/?post_type=people&p=2000"},"modified":"2025-04-03T09:24:22","modified_gmt":"2025-04-03T13:24:22","slug":"joseph-plaster","status":"publish","type":"people","link":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/museums-society\/directory\/joseph-plaster\/","title":{"rendered":"Joseph Plaster"},"featured_media":2794,"template":"","role":[61],"filter":[],"class_list":["post-2000","people","type-people","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","role-faculty"],"acf":[],"post_meta_fields":{"_edit_lock":["1743686664:433"],"_edit_last":["433"],"_thumbnail_id":["2794"],"ecpt_people_alpha":["Plaster"],"ecpt_position":["Director, Tabb Center & Curator in Public Humanities"],"ecpt_degrees":["PhD, Yale University (American Studies)"],"ecpt_bio":["

Dr. Joseph Plaster is Curator in Public Humanities and Director of the\u00a0Winston Tabb Special Collections Research Center<\/a>\u00a0for the Sheridan Libraries & University Museums. In this capacity, he cultivates an exchange of knowledge between the university and greater Baltimore community through participatory action research, oral history initiatives, performance, and courses taught through the\u00a0Program in Museums and Society<\/a>. His 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.<\/p>\r\n

Plaster is the author of\u00a0Kids on the Street: Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco\u2019s Tenderloin<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(Feb 2023, Duke University Press). Kids on the Street<\/em> 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\u00a0in particular, over the past century. Drawing on archival,\u00a0ethnographic, oral history, and public humanities research, Plaster outlines the kinship networks, syncretic religious practices, storytelling traditions, and migratory patterns that allowed kids to foster forms of mutual aid. By highlighting a politics where the marginal position of street youth is the basis for a moral economy of reciprocity, Plaster excavates a history of queer life that has been overshadowed by major narratives of gay progress and pride.\u00a0Plaster\u2019s\u00a0academic writing<\/a>\u00a0has also appeared in\u00a0Radical History Review<\/em>,\u00a0The Public Historian<\/em>,\u00a0The Abusable Past<\/em>,\u00a0Kalfou,\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.<\/em><\/p>\r\n

Plaster\u2019s\u00a0public humanities projects<\/a>\u00a0bring together diverse publics\u2014including curators, archivists, artists, and activists\u2014as partners in research and education.\u00a0He is the recipient of the National Council on Public History\u2019s 2023 Outstanding Public History Project Award for the\u00a0Peabody Ballroom Experience<\/a>, an ongoing collaboration with the queer and trans artists of color who animate Baltimore\u2019s ballroom scene. As part of the faculty team for\u00a0Inheritance Baltimore: Humanities and Arts Education for Black Liberation, Plaster develops community-based oral history projects focused on trans of color experience. Additionally, he was awarded the American Historical Association\u2019s Allan B\u00e9rub\u00e9 Prize for\u00a0Polk Street: Lives in Transition<\/a>, a project that drew on more than seventy original oral histories to intervene in debates about gentrification, homelessness, queer politics, and public safety in the highly polarized setting of gentrifying San Francisco.<\/p>"],"ecpt_email":["jplaster@jhu.edu"],"ecpt_teaching":["

Courses Taught:<\/p>\r\n