Staff profile

I arrived at Durham as an Assistant Professor of History in 2017 after three years as the Cotsen-Fund for Reunion Fellow in the Princeton Society of Fellows at Princeton University. An interdisciplinary scholar, I hold a BA in English Literature from the University of Cambridge and an MA in Contemporary History and Politics from Birkbeck, University of London. I completed my PhD in History at Yale University in 2014.

While I am primarily a historian of C20th Britain and the United States, my intellectual interests extend more broadly to histories of gender and sexuality in transnational perspective, with feminist geographers, queer theorists, legal studies scholars, literary critics, and historians of intimacy all informing this pursuit. Current projects include a forthcoming book chapter on queer legal history and journal articles on the transatlantic diffusion of sexual privacy law and the queerness of James Bond’s domestic and foreign affairs. I am also completing my first book project on transnational currents of mid-C20th gay and sexual politics. This is titled An Intimate Atlantic: The Special Relationships of Transnational Homophile Activism.

• C20th Britain
• C20th United States
• Gender and Sexuality
• International and Transnational History
• Legal History

Chapter in book

• Minto, D. (2018). Queering Law's Empire: Domination and Domain in the Sexing Up of Legal History. In M. D. Dubber, & C. Tomlins (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Legal History (641-659). Oxford University Press
• Minto, D. (2013). "Mr Grey Goes to Washington: the homophile internationalism of Britain's Homosexual Law Reform Society". In B. Lewis (Ed.), British Queer History: New Approaches and Perspectives (219-243). Manchester University Press

Journal Article

• Minto, D. (2018). Perversion by Penumbras: Wolfenden, Griswold, and the Transatlantic Trajectory of Sexual Privacy. American Historical Review, 123(4), 1093-1121. https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhy027
• Belmonte, L. A., Bradley, M. P., Capó Jr., J., Farber, P., Fitzpatrick, S., McAlister, M., Minto, D., Sherry, M., Shibusawa, N., & Von Eschen, P. (2016). "Colloquy: Queering America and the World". Diplomatic History, 40(1), 19-80. https://doi.org/10.1093/dh/dhv057