Myra Billund-Phibbs

Myra Billund-Phibbs is a social, gender, and legal historian and PhD Candidate in History interested in the relationship between people’s social and sexual lives, legal and political advocacy, and psycho-medical entanglements in the mid-to-late 20th century United States. Her dissertation, "From the House on Poof Corner: Trans Life and Politics in the American Midwest, 1964 - 1983," focuses on a small group of transsexual women, transsexual men, and other gender minority people in the Upper Midwest in the 1970s, specifically examining their social lives and relationships to political, legal, and medical institutions using microhistorical and oral history methods. She was previously Project Manager of the Tretter Transgender Oral History Project, an archivist for the Tretter Collection in GLBT Studies and Hennepin County Library Special Collections, and a tour guide and presenter on LGBT histories in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. A recipient of several research grants and awards including the LGBTQ+ History Association's Estelle Freedman Award and the University of Minnesota Program in Law & History's Erickson Graduate Fellowship, her writing has been published in Australian Feminist Studies, MNopedia (the online encyclopedia of the Minnesota Historical Society,) and Process, the blog of the Organization of American Historians (OAH,) and is forthcoming in the Women's History Review.