Nicholas Syrett

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Nicholas L. Syrett is a professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and an associate dean in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, at the University of Kansas, United States. There, he is also a professor, by courtesy, in the History Department, and as of 2023, a coeditor of the Journal of the History of Sexuality.

Syrett's scholarship of interest to MAPs, AAMs and their allies, concerns debates over intergenerational / age-gap or Youth-Adult Marriage. In 2016, his book American Child Bride: A History of Minors and Marriage in the United States was published. One of our editorial team reviewed this work for 1st-wave MAP activist Tom O'Carroll's blog heretictoc, focusing on an example of positively experienced age-gap marriage between Captain Thomas Mayne Reid (35) and the aristocrat Elizabeth Hyde (15). Hyde took the name Elizabeth Reid after insisting she marry Reid, even if her father refused to consent to their union. The blog discusses her account of their meeting and criticizes Syrett's framing of the account. While Syrett explicitly condemns the practice of unlawful age-gap marriage, his work discusses the changing history of "age" as a category itself - how we relate to this category - and gives reasons for how and why it was not as important in the past. His 2016 book argues that "earlier Americans had a functional, rather than chronological, understanding of childhood" (p. 4), and helps to explain why such marriages could be functional and experienced positively by those involved, as they were not heavily stigmatized or assumed / expected to be inherently psychologically harmful.

Syrett's work is particularly notable for historicizing the concept of age, arguing, as historian Alex Lichtenstein summarized, that age "is not a neutral fact, but a vector of power through which officials and ordinary people construct and contest the boundaries of citizenship and belonging".

Some of Syrett's publications are listed with links below, and we recommend the 2020 open-access introduction to the special issue on Restoring Intergenerational Dynamics to Queer History, co-authored with Rachel Hope Cleves and Averill Earls, and his chapter on "Age" in the 2020 Routledge History of American Sexuality.

Selected publications

Books

• Syrett, Nicholas L. (2016). American Child Bride: A History of Minors and Marriage in the United States, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Articles and Book Chapters

• Syrett, Nicholas L. (2023). "Youth Cultures, Sexuality, and the Persistence of the Double Standard in the Twentieth-Century United States." In James Marten, ed., Oxford Handbook of the History of Youth Culture (313-332). New York: Oxford University Press.

• Pomfret, David and Nicholas L. Syrett (2023). "Concepts of Youth." In Kristine Alexander and Simon Sleight, eds., A Cultural History of Youth in the Modern Age (19-40). London: Bloomsbury.

• Syrett, Nicholas L. (2021). "Age Disparity, Marriage, and the Gendering of Heterosexuality." In Rebecca L. Davis & Michele Mitchell, eds., Heterosexual Histories (96-119). New York: New York University Press.

• Syrett, Nicholas L. (2020). "Introduction" to "Sex Across the Ages: Restoring Intergenerational Dynamics to Queer History." Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 46 (1): 1-12.

• Field, Corinne T. and Nicholas L. Syrett (2020). "Introduction," to "Chronological Age: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis." American Historical Review 125 (2): 370-384.

• Field, Corinne T. and Nicholas L. Syrett (2020). "Age and the Construction of Gendered and Raced Citizenship in the United States." American Historical Review, 125 (2): 438-450.

• Syrett, Nicholas L. (2020). "Age." In Kevin P. Murphy, Jason Ruiz, & David Serlin, eds., The Routledge History of American Sexuality (21-31). New York: Routledge.

• Nicholas L. Syrett (2015). "Statutory Marriage Ages and the Gendered Construction of Adulthood in the Nineteenth Century." In Field, Corinne T. and Nicholas L. Syrett, eds., Age in America: The Colonial Era to the Present. New York: New York University Press.