As someone who has had the honor of writing a number of Teacher, Writer, Scholar profiles on PWR colleagues over the years, I’ve become accustomed to the feeling of being stunned by the nuance and quality of the scholarship PWR lecturers are working on. I can think of no better example of that than my recent encounter with Nora Kassner’s project-in-progress and forthcoming book. With the working title Hard to Place: Homosexuality, Foster Care, and the Remaking of the American Family, Nora is currently finishing a historical account that “reveals the centrality of gay and lesbian actors to the remaking of parenthood, family, and citizenship in the United States” and the pivotal role of the foster system in this history. A few weeks ago, on an unseasonably warm, late-January day at Coupa Café, Nora was generous enough to spend an hour chatting with me about her project over lunch, where I had the pleasure of learning more about our colleague’s work and background as a historian and how it shapes her teaching.
Nora earned a PhD in History with a concentration in feminist studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2023. Her dissertation, on which the book project is based, won the prestigious 2024 John D’Emilio Award for best dissertation in U.S. LGBTQ studies from the Organization of American Historians. Prior to arriving at Stanford in 2024, Nora taught for a year at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where she was Assistant Professor-in-Residence of First Year Seminar and Internships. For Stanford PWR, Nora teaches two courses, both of which emerge directly from her research: PWR 1NK: Rhetorics of Childhood and PWR 2NK: Speaking and Writing for a Better World. Hard to Place is currently under advanced contract at the University of Pennsylvania Press, with a projected completion date of late 2027.
When I asked Nora about how her research unfolded, she told me about how she initially came to the topic before beginning graduate school, during her time community organizing in Minnesota. In her work on marriage equality, she wanted to understand more about why communities could be “so constrained in solutions,” in particular around organizing “fractures” where queer rights were not automatically seen as connected to racial and economic justice. It was in this context that Nora stumbled upon her first archive: a series of newspaper articles about affluent, white gay men in New Jersey and Florida (and later in Los Angeles) fostering Black and Brown children with HIV/AIDS during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Here, Nora saw an untold and crucial story, where mainly Black and Latine children were separated from parents with HIV/AIDS by foster-care agencies. This created a “manufactured crisis,” which the same agencies then turned to gay communities—themselves hit hard by the HIV/AIDS epidemic and crisis—to address. An influential consequence of this trend was the creation of a new cultural mythology of the “good” gay, white, affluent dad, which subsequently became the basis for arguments for marriage equality (and a root of the fracture in solidarity Nora observed in her organizing work).
What Nora realized, in the process of recovering this story, was how poorly foster care fits into how historians have understood the American state. Hard to Place works to tell this history, of how fundamental the foster system is to understanding the history of the American family as it relates not only to LGBTQ parenthood and families, but to race, economic status, and citizenship. Let me give you Nora, in an excerpt from her book proposal, which she was generous to share with us:
Foster parenting was the first state-sanctioned form of gay and lesbian parenthood in the United States, and gay and lesbian foster parents were central in fights for adoption across the country. The story of how gay and lesbian people become foster parents reveals not only the changing contours of family policy in the twentieth century, but also the entanglement of medical, carceral, and welfare systems in the racialized, gendered, sexed, and classed contestations over citizenship.
Part of the research for Hard to Place has consisted in archival work, including at ONE Archives at the University of Southern California, the largest repository of LGBTQ materials in the world. But, as Nora explains, archival research on foster care is “extremely difficult” because record-keeping is often minimal. For this reason, an important component of the research for the book has also been in the form of oral histories taken with social workers, judges, attorneys, activists, and foster-parents.
Speaking with Nora, it was immediately clear to me how her work directly informs how she teaches research writing to our PWR students. Nora’s systems-level view of a truly intersectional cultural and historical problem, which emerged from real-world organizing experience, and led her to archives (and their limitations) and then to oral history: if this arc felt instantly familiar to me, that’s because its attendance to real-world exigences and its demonstration of agility across research modalities are exactly lessons we seek to impart to our PWR 1 and 2 students. Nora told me more, specifically, about how her research experience informs her teaching in her new PWR 2 course “Speaking and Writing for a Better World.” In this context, she hopes that students “choose a community they are a part of and research a problem that exists within it, leveraging writing and speaking skills to target a real audience to do something.” In Nora’s course, ideally everything students produce could potentially be something they bring back to their communities. This pragmatist pedagogy also emerges from her research, and addresses a familiar and sometimes confounding paradox from her academic training as a historian. As Nora puts it, “Historians are really good at telling you what went wrong. We’re not always as good at telling you what to do about that.” Or, as Nora put it in a slightly different context, she is “interested in understanding the limits of our current activist toolkit” and working to address and expand those limits.
I wanted to understand, also, how Nora thinks about the relation between history and rhetoric as academic disciplines. For Nora, history and writing studies, in particular, are “fundamentally similar in how they are thinking about document production.” Historians are also “obsessed with questions of exigency, how particular contexts and moments influence the choices an author made as a writer,” as well as the “afterlives” of documents: for instance, who circulated and read them. These, Nora explains, are all ultimately “rhetorical questions” in addition to being the purview of historical research.
So, what does Nora’s research and writing process look like on the ground? Most of the original archival and oral history research for Hard to Place took place during grad school, so, currently, further research mostly involves going back to sources for updates (given the age demographics of parents and children who were in the foster system between the 1970s and 1990s, many of these updates are about grandchildren). As far as the actual writing of the book goes, I could hardly relate more to Nora’s candid description of her process: “I sit alone. I write. I get grumpy at anyone who interrupts. I have to be in the zone. Do not interrupt me.”
Another question I always love to ask colleagues is who they consider to be significant influences on their work and teaching. Here, Nora referred me to a print she keeps in her office, a representation of the “Uprising of the 20,000” by the artist Ricardo Levins Morales. The “20,000” were low-wage, immigrant women working in the garment industry on New York’s Lower East Side during the first part of the twentieth century. What Nora appreciates about the photo is how it represents not only a labor strike, but one that emphasizes the role of education in class consciousness and social change. When these women came together to organize to improve labor conditions, the first thing they did was organize classes, “because they felt education was the most important thing for change-making: English classes, language classes, political theory.” Nora first learned about this movement in the context of her bat mitzvah, when, at a secular humanist congregation in Ann Arbor, Michigan, she had to write papers on important women in Jewish history. The book Common Sense and a Little Fire: Women and Working-Class Politics in the United States, 1900-1965, by Annelise Orleck, documents the history of the 20,000. It was in the context of this book—which was given to her by her mother—that she came to see “how education and activism can work hand and hand to create more stable, livable lives.” A fundamental principle that emerges from this example, for Nora, is that “we all have ways to be teachers and learners.”
It’s hard to imagine a more apt image to decorate the wall of Nora’s office, where, if you walk by, you can sometimes observe her crocheting through the window in her rare free moments waiting for students to come by for office hours. And I was unsurprised to learn that Nora’s hobby interests in crocheting and embroidery also have a further historical dimension. Explaining what she does in her spare time at home, “After 8:00PM every night I can be found embroidering a copy of a fifteenth-century tapestry.” This tapestry—a replica of one of the Flemish Lady and the Unicorn series—is Nora’s other major work in progress, and it has been a mainstay of her sanity since 2015. Allow me to leave you with the description of this labor, this commitment, from Nora herself, which I believe captures our colleague and her diligence: “I’ve been working on it longer than it takes to complete a dissertation, longer than the time it takes to create a child. I’m still one year out.”
