LEARN MORE ABOUT DR. BABITS

I grew up in Attleboro, Massachusetts, where I got into just the right amount of trouble as a hard-headed and obstinate youth. From a young age, I displayed a love of history. Family lore emphasizes how when I was 8 years old, I "forced" my whole family to remain at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., for several hours longer than anyone else wanted to stay. Once I reached middle school, social studies was by far my favorite subject. The only thing shocking about me becoming a professional historian? I might've been a bit of a slacker in high school.

I attended Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, for my BA and MA in history. My studies focused on the historical developments of slavery and abolition throughout the Atlantic World. Under the supervision of Drs. Drew McCoy and Janette Greenwood, my honors thesis explored Boston's response to John Brown's raid. The 150-page thesis specifically emphasized how Black Bostonians exhibited complex emotions about Brown's goal of staging a violent insurrection to end slavery in the United States.

I continued to study and write about slavery and abolition as a master's student. Cultural and intellectual history seminars, however, challenged me to think about the field differently. When I examined a host of sources by abolitionists and aimed at a juvenile audience, I developed an interest in education, inculcation, and the history of ideas. Writing about juvenile abolitionist literature, with its emphasis on morality, religiosity, and political change, helped me grow as a thinker and as a historian.

After completing my master's, I worked as a museum educator at the Nantucket Historical Association. Over the course of the summer, I redesigned a tour of a whaling captain's mansion, processed and catalogued new acquisitions, and served as a docent and interpreter. Though the pay was meager, the experience was well worth it. I was able to draw from my knowledge of the antebellum era, the Civil War, race and religion, and the history of slavery and abolition in my first job after graduating with a master's degree. To celebrate my time on Nantucket, an island rich with maritime history, I have an aggressively large tattoo of a whale on my left arm.

I then began my career as a teacher. I started as an on-campus boarding school teacher at the Oxford Academy, a small, all-boys high school in Westbrook, Connecticut. At Oxford, I excelled as a social studies teacher, dorm master, and coordinator of student activities. I won "Dorm Master of the Term" for fourteen of the fifteen terms I worked there. (I still thinks the one term he didn't receive this recognition was "rigged.") For three years, I enjoyed teaching reading-intensive electives on such topics as the Civil War, American Maritime History, and American Culture Since World War II. It was a challenging, though rewarding, beginning to teaching young people the importance of the historical discipline.

After a year as a dormitory supervisor at Keio Academy, a Japanese and Japanese-American boarding school in Purchase, New York, I started doctoral studies in social studies education at Teachers College, Columbia University. My coursework focused largely on American history, the history of education, and gender and sexuality in educational contexts. In addition to taking courses, I played a prominent role in redesigning the Program in Social Studies' methods courses and student teaching seminars. In the 2013-2014 academic year, I served as the student teaching coordinator, which involved leading the day-to-day operations of the program's in-service master's program and teaching two courses per semester. I passed my doctoral exams in social studies education in April 2014. But at Columbia, my passion for historical inquiry thrived. I knew that a PhD in history would provide great personal and intellectual fulfillment.

I continued my educational journey at The University of Texas at Austin in 2014. There, I excelled in a range of courses and demonstrated a deep desire to engage with historical debates about religion, psychology, racial ideology, and gender and sexuality. Dr. Jacqueline Jones wrote that I crafted "one of the best graduate seminar papers I have ever read." Dr. Daina Ramey Berry described me as a "standout student" in Gender, Slavery, and Sexuality and conveyed that my seminar paper on James Henry Hammond's concubines "offered a sharp analysis of both primary and secondary sources." In October 2016, my comprehensive exam committee, comprised of Drs. Robert Abzug, Daina Berry, and Robert Olwell, assessed my written portfolio and oral defense as "a performance of the very best in depth, range of knowledge, and interpretive skill." The committee ranked my performance as "exceptional," the highest level offered for the History Department's comprehensive exam.

After passing my exams, I embarked on an intensive archival adventure to uncover the history of conversion therapy in the United States. Between October 2016 and August 2018, I visited 35 archives to engage with social, cultural, and intellectual sources to understand the history of conversion therapy. These travels throughout the country showed that conversion therapy was much more complicated than simply "praying the gay away" in evangelical support groups. Instead, I noted the importance of a conservative lived religion that guided efforts to instill normative sexual desires and gender identities in people. This conservative lived religion, I argue in my dissertation, explains how even figures of the sixties counterculture, such as Timothy Leary (the famed proponent of LSD), advocated for conversion therapy. In May 2019, my dissertation committee (Drs. Robert Abzug, Jacqueline Jones, Jennifer Graber, Lauren Gutterman, and Mark Micale) passed the dissertation with no revisions.

During the 2019-2020 academic year, I was an Andrew W. Mellon Engaged Scholars Initiative (ESI) Postdoctoral Fellow. As an ESI fellow, I worked on a number of projects to help the general public understand not only conversion therapy but also histories of gender and sexuality. I served as a historical advisor for Cured, an award-winning documentary that explores the decisions to include and then remove homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. I also advised and wrote narrative text for Conversion, a documentary that examines how one conversion therapist changed his mind about the ethics of sexual orientation and gender identity change therapies. In addition, as an ESI fellow, I created several interactive lesson plans for Sexing History, helped the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C. develop a "white paper" about conversion therapy, and crafted a book proposal to submit to presses.

With the help of my agent, Will Lippincott, I successful signed my book project, To Cure a Sinful Nation: A History of Conversion Therapy, with the University of Chicago Press in October 2020. Multiple presses sent out the book proposal for review. In their evaluations, anonymous reviewers highlighted the "ambitious and timely" nature of the book and the "savvy methodology of extensive archival research and oral histories" as reasons to provide a contract. One reviewer wrote the following: "Babits writes engagingly and brings together so many different fields and perspectives. I especially like the way he writes about the people that he's met on research trips and at conferences. He makes history interesting!" Three presses drew up contracts to sign my book. Chicago offered me a $27,500 advance for the rights to publish To Cure a Sinful Nation.

I have since been a postdoctoral teaching fellow, a temporary assistant professor, and the director of education and professional learning at Utah State University. There, I have taught history, intersectional gender studies, and psychology. I have developed an asynchronous online section of HIST 1700: American History into one of the best enrolled courses in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. In other courses, such as HIST/IGS 3040: The History of Sexuality, HIST/RELS 4790: American Religious History, and HIST 6880/PSY 6100: History and Systems of Psychology, I help students build important twenty-first century skills, including critical thinking, effective written and oral communication, problem solving, perseverance, information literacy, and digital literacy. Students continually rate me as an "excellent" teacher in their evaluations of teaching.

When I am not working, I enjoy traveling, trying out new recipes, brewing my own beer, watching football and basketball, and spoiling Pretzel, an adorable miniature schnauzer who thinks he should have been the focus of this "About" page.