Dr. Charlie Jeffries (pronouns: she/her) is Assistant Professor in American and Media Studies at the University of Sussex. She studied American Studies as an undergraduate at King’s College London (University of London), with a year abroad at Georgetown University. She also holds a Master of Studies from the University of Oxford, and a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge. Charlie is a modern historian of gender and sexuality in the United States, with a focus on twentieth- and early twenty-first century social movements and debates over sexuality in US media and politics during this period.

Charlie is the author of Teenage Dreams: Girlhood Sexualities in the US Culture Wars (Rutgers University Press, 2022), which won the Arthur Miller Institute First Book Award from the British Association of American Studies in 2023. Teenage Dreams examines the race- and class-inflected political battles over teenagers’ sexual and reproductive lives in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century US, and argues that the sexual identities of teenagers were critical in exposing unexpected moral and political fluidity amongst culture war actors. She is also the co-editor, with Sarah Crook, of Resist, Organize, Build: Feminist and Queer Activism in Britain and the United States during the Long 1980s (SUNY Press, 2022), and she has published articles in the Journal of American Studies and in Comparative American Studies.

Charlie’s current research projects continue to explore how underground discourse and debates about sexuality have shaped the landscape of US politics. Her next major research project focuses on the now-defunct lesbian magazine Girlfriends and its implications for developments in queer activist politics in the 1990s and 2000s, and she is also working on an article on the debates in American politics and the media over sexuality on the US campus in the 1990s.

Before joining Sussex in 2022, Charlie held a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at Birkbeck, University of London. She has also previously held lectureships at Keble College, Oxford and at the University of East Anglia, and a pre-doctoral Fox Fellowship at Yale University. She has also received funding for her research from the AHRC, Duke University, Boston University, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

At Sussex, Charlie is on the Steering Committee for the Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence, and she is the Co-Director of the Sussex Centre for American Studies.