The Public Universal Friend

In this episode, host Denis Long is joined by professor Scott Larson as they discuss Public Universal Friend, a traveling non-binary Quaker minister, and the complexities of gender identity in early Quaker history.

Scott Larson is a Lecturer IV in the department of American Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is a scholar of transgender history and culture, with a particular focus on early American culture and religion. His scholarship investigates the ways that radical religious experience in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world transformed gender, sexuality, disability, and racial formations in early America. His work has appeared in the Journal of Early American Studies and Transgender Studies Quarterly. He received a M.A. in Theology from Yale Divinity School and received his Ph.D. in American Studie ...