Mary Zaborskis, Ph.D.

Mary Zaborskis is an Assistant Professor of American Studies and Gender Studies at Penn State Harrisburg. She received her PhD in English with a certificate in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies from the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to joining the community at Penn State Harrisburg, she was a Diversity Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities Center at the University of Pittsburgh. Mary works at the intersections of queer, critical race, and childhood studies in twentieth-century and contemporary American literature and culture. Her book, Queer Childhoods: Institutional Futures of Indigeneity, Race, and Disability (New York University Press, 2024) explores how children’s genders and sexualities were managed in late-nineteenth and twentieth-century boarding schools for marginalized populations. She was the recipient of Penn State's Center for Sexual and Gender Diversity 2022 Academic Achievement Award and Harrisburg's 2023 Faculty Diversity Award.

Mary’s work has appeared in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, WSQ, Journal of Homosexuality, and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Her work on Native American boarding schools, published in the special "Child Now" issue of GLQ, received the Crompton-Noll Prize for Best Article in LGBTQ Studies at the 2019 Modern Language Association convention. She serves on the Executive Committee of the Childhood and Youth Studies Caucus of the American Studies Association and is chair of the National Women’s Studies Association’s Feminist Pedagogy Interest Group. Mary is a series editor at Public Books, where she edits the “Shoptalk” and “Quizzical” features. She also serves on the Steering Committee of the LGBT Center of Central PA's History Project. Her teaching interests include queer theory, gender and sexuality studies, disability studies, Native American studies, ethnic U.S. literature, media studies, and popular culture.