Stephen Vider (Stee-ven Vee-der) is a social, cultural, and political historian.

His research, teaching, and public scholarship explore the history of gender, sexuality, home, and family in the United States after World War II.

His first book, The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Domesticity After World War II, traces how American conceptions of the home have shaped LGBT relationships and politics from 1945 to the present. The book received honorable mention for the American Studies Association’s 2022 John Hope Franklin Prize for best book in American studies published in 2021.

Vider’s academic writing has appeared in American Quarterly, Gender & History, Transition, American Psychologist, and The Public Historian, as well as several edited volumes. He has also written about politics and culture for the New York Times, Slate, Time, Avidly, and the Village Voice. He serves on the editorial board of The Public Historian and is co-editor of a special issue of GLQ, titled Queering the Domestic, forthcoming in October 2024.

Vider has also contributed to a range of public history projects. In 2017, he curated the exhibition AIDS at Home: Art and Everyday Activism for the Museum of the City of New York, exploring how activists and artists have mobilized domestic space and redefined family in response to HIV/AIDS, from the 1980s to the present. A Place in the City, a short film he co-directed with Nate Lavey for AIDS at Home, has been featured in film festivals, programs, and exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, Istanbul, and Brighton, England. He was also co-curator of the exhibition Gay Gotham: Art and Underground Culture in New York (Museum of the City of New York, 2016-2017) and co-author of the accompanying book, published by Skira Rizzoli.

He is Associate Professor of History and co-director of Gender and Sexuality Studies at Bryn Mawr College, where he teaches courses in twentieth century U.S. history, public history, and history of gender and sexuality. He was previously Associate Professor of History and founding director of the Public History Initiative at Cornell University and Associate Professor of History at University of Connecticut. He has also held positions as a visiting assistant professor in History, Museum Studies, and Gender and Sexuality Studies at Bryn Mawr College from 2017 to 2019; an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow at the Museum of the City of New York from 2015 to 2017; and the Cassius Marcellus Clay Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Sexuality at Yale University from 2013 to 2015. He was a member at the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, in Spring 2024.

Vider has also served as a historical consultant for exhibitions, documentary films, musicals, and walking tours, including projects at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Brooklyn Historical Society.

Vider received his BA from Yale University and his PhD in History of American Civilization from Harvard University.