Joseph Plaster
Affiliations
2026-27 Scholar in Residence, “Oral History Fieldwork” and “Curating Oral Histories”
About
Joseph Plaster is an interdisciplinary scholar trained in oral history and queer studies, with teaching and research fields at the intersections of U.S. 20th century urban history, performance studies, public humanities, and LGBTQ studies of religion.
Plaster is a Senior Lecturer in the Program in Museums and Society and Curator in Public Humanities at Johns Hopkins University, where he develops collaborative research initiatives that bring together archives, oral history, performance, and community-based scholarship. His work emphasizes collaborative oral history as a form of public knowledge-making and collective world-building among minoritized communities.
He is the author of Kids on the Street: Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco's Tenderloin (Duke University Press, 2023), which draws on oral history and archival research to reconstruct the informal support networks created by queer and trans street kids in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, from the 1950s to 2010s. The book received the Oral History Association Book Award, the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction from The Publishing Triangle, and the Joe William Trotter, Jr. Book Prize for best first book in urban history.
Plaster has directed oral history and public history initiatives focused on AIDS activism, queer and trans homelessness, and urban transformation, including the Trans Histories Lab, the San Francisco ACT UP Oral History Project, Vanguard Revisited, and Polk Street: Lives in Transition, a project that mobilized more than seventy oral histories to intervene in debates about gentrification, homelessness, and public safety in San Francisco.
Since 2018, Plaster has directed the Peabody Ballroom Experience, a collaboration between Johns Hopkins University and Baltimore’s ballroom scene—a performance-based community created by queer and trans people of color. The project combines oral history, documentary film, epic performance competitions, and undergraduate teaching. It received the National Council on Public History’s 2023 Outstanding Project Award.
His current book project, Vanguard: A Queer History of Mutual Aid, tells the story of a pathbreaking activist group founded in San Francisco in 1966 by an unlikely alliance of sex workers, street kids, urban ministers, and anti-poverty activists affiliated with the federal War on Poverty. Drawing on archival research and oral histories, he shows how Vanguard worked to meet survival needs—providing free meals, emergency housing, and medical aid—while developing a multi-issue activist analysis that remains vital and relevant today.