Alumni Interview with Annelise Heinz

Annelise Heinz (Stanford History PhD 2015) is Associate Professor of History at the University of Oregon. She is primarily a historian of modern America whose research focuses on the intersections of gender, race/ethnicity, and sexuality. Her work has been featured by National Public Radio, The Wall Street Journal, South China Morning Post, Time.com, and National Geographic among others. Heinz is the author of Mahjong: A Chinese Game and the Making of Modern American Culture, which explores the American history of the Chinese parlor game mahjong in the first half of the twentieth century. Mapping the history of mahjong in widely varied settings, the project places the game at the heart of modern American redefinitions of race, gender, and consumer culture. Originally from Southern California, Heinz first lived in the Northwest, where she received her B.A. in History from Whitman College. Before starting her Ph.D. at Stanford,  she worked in education and social work in Washington State and taught English at Yunnan University. After Stanford, she joined the faculty at University of Texas at Dallas and later moved to the University of Oregon.

How did you become interested in history?

I've always been fascinated by material history across time, beginning as a kid running across things from decades or centuries before. I started to get excited about history as a way of  interpreting and narrating the past in middle school because I had a history teacher who was a great storyteller. That's really when history as a field of study first came into my consciousness. 

How did your undergraduate interests at Whitman College carry through to your PhD at Stanford?

Whitman College was absolutely formative and foundational for me wanting to pursue history as a career. Early in my time at Whitman, I took a women's history class that sparked my interest in gender and women's history, history of sexuality, and queer history. It was an experience that transformed my understanding of history as created, as a historical and social construction. My first project also came out of some experiences at Whitman; in my senior year, I took a gender in China class. That course solidified my interest in Chinese history and transpacific history, particularly between the US and China. 

I wrote an honors thesis at Whitman’s History department about the changing understanding of women's relationships. I focused on the historical change from romantic friendships that were largely socially accepted in the nineteenth century, to a sign of deviance or psychological disturbance in the twentieth century. It ended up being quite long and was all original research. Going through that research planted a seed that I'm returning to now in my current project about lesbian history. 

After we graduated, my partner, who is also a Whittie, and I stayed close to the campus in Walla Walla. I was doing some research as an unpaid assistant for a Chinese history professor. In turn, he helped me connect with Chinese language classes at Whitman that I could audit while I was working. I worked in town in education and social work, and by the end of that time decided that I really did want to pursue a PhD in history. We then moved to Kunming in China and taught at Yunnan University for a year. That's when mahjong came into my life, as well as solidifying an interest in transpacific history. 

Mahjong features greatly in your 2015  Stanford History dissertation and later in your  first book, Mahjong: A Chinese Game and the Making of Modern American Culture (Oxford University Press, 2021). How does turning one’s dissertation into a book  work?

The purpose of a dissertation in terms of its audience and what it's trying to achieve is fundamentally different from a book. But, there is also room for strong overlap. One of the biggest differences is that in a book, you are speaking to a broad audience of people who may be coming to this topic for a lot of different reasons, but are not specialists in this particular field and who have a lot of competition for their attention. The book has to keep a reader engaged and interested and moving through the text. Nobody has to read your book. You do have a committee who has to read your dissertation. 

A joyful part for me of turning the dissertation into a book was that I could bring in some creative nonfiction elements, in the way that I began chapters with certain scenes, trying to bring a reader into a sensory and social world. One of the biggest challenges is being out of graduate school and juggling multiple professional positions with their own learning curves. Making time for turning the dissertation into a book is actually one of the biggest challenges.

Some of your publications build upon your Stanford connections.

Yes, I continued to work with Stanford colleagues in and beyond the History department after I graduated. My most recent 2026 article in Signs is co-authored with my Oregon colleague Judith Raiskin, who received her Ph.D. in English from Stanford in the 1980s. In 2022, I co-organized a conference in honor of my Ph.D. advisor Professor Estelle Freedman. The work presented there inspired Brenda Frink (Stanford History PhD 2010), who is the associate editor of the Pacific Historical Review, to launch a special issue focused on “New Directions in Feminist History.” Cameron Blevins (Stanford History Ph.D. 2015) and I wrote  “’Separated but far from alone’: Forging Lesbian Networks in the 1970s-1980s”, which ended up receiving three awards: the 2024 Article Prize from the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, 2025 Barbara Kanner Award from the Western Association of Women Historians, and 2025 Koontz Award from the Pacific Historical Review.

What projects are you working on now? 

I am currently working on a book project tentatively titled Collective: How Lesbian Feminists Reimagined Society, about lesbian feminist community-building and alternative economies in the late twentieth century—from rural communes to urban bookstores and beyond. At the same time, I'm co-leading related collaborative digital public history projects. Together with a team of digital historians and the help of student research assistants, we are mapping thousands of lesbian-identified people, businesses, events, and more to analyze the economic, personal, and political networks established in the 1970s-'90s.

Do you have a favorite archive or library?

For both of my book projects, the Schlesinger Library at Harvard has been very important and an invaluable community, in part because they also have resources. They're able to financially support researchers, which is huge. 

For my current project, community archives have been at the heart of LGBTQ history more generally, in this case, lesbian history specifically. Three that come to mind are the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn, the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives in Los Angeles, and the Gerber/Hart LGBTQ+ Library & Archives.  The Herstory Archives in Brooklyn is in this huge, beautiful brownstone that a caretaker lives in as well. The library is in the living room, it's in the dining room. You see these bedrooms transformed into the newspaper archives, for example. And it's just remarkable, a very different spatial relationship. It also lends itself to a sense of intimacy and family. That's unique. And it meant that when I was researching at the Herstory Archives, once they got to know me and we developed trust, they gave me a key to the house and I was able to go in and out whenever I needed to do research, which is so helpful and so different from an archive at a university where I'm rushing to be there when they open and then I have to leave for their lunch break, and then I come back and then I have to stop at four p.m. sharp. That's really not how research works. And so to have this living space is quite amazing. 

One of my very favorite archival experiences that blends both the institutional strengths of organization and access with a sense of community and relationships is the Iowa Women's Archives, based at the University of Iowa. They carry the strengths of an institutional structure while being very small and very connected to the individuals whose papers are in the archives, and they are very supportive of researchers. I love the Iowa Women's Archives. 

These small archives have been central to queer history record keeping because institutions have historically been hostile and untrustworthy. I think we're living in a moment where we see again what can happen if government power and the funding attached to that becomes weaponized against queer histories. Whether it's from lack of historical support or the possibility of actually doing harm to these records, community archives are really at the heart of it. They tend to be, for better or for worse, far less resourced and organized, but are also scrappy and community-oriented. Their emphasis is on access for members of the community, access to their own histories that are not mediated by professional association or career or class. And, you can directly get into the stacks as a researcher in a way that is basically impossible in any kind of formal or institutional archives. 

What texts inspired you the most in your career?

My advisor at Stanford, the great Estelle Freedman, co-wrote a foundational text that helped create the field of the history of sexuality called Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America. It came out initially in 1988. I read it in the women's history class I took at Whitman College. Intimate Matters provides an intellectual roadmap to thinking through a lot of things that are invisible or taken for granted in the way that we understand and experience something called sexuality. And so to think about that in historical context, and to see Estelle and John D'Emilio do this research from scratch, was to see it come alive out of a text from the late ‘80s. In many ways, it was a very powerful experience. I'm delighted to say that they are going to be working on the fourth edition of Intimate Matters, which will be the first actual updating of the text, rather than just adding on chapters. And I'll be working with Estelle and John to revise it, which I'm very excited about.

What are some key things you remember from your time at Stanford?

Getting to work with Estelle has been one of the great joys of my life. I didn't know how amazing she would be as a mentor. I also didn't know how important it was to work with an academic advisor who is also able to be a mentor. Every time I met with her, I felt like she was saying, “That was good. Now do it better and I'm going to show you how.” That was exactly what I wanted and needed to grow. And it's something that I try to give my students now. 

Part of my connection to Stanford is just the physical and natural environment, a lot of sensory associations and affection for aspects of Stanford and Stanford's campus. I lived in San Francisco the whole time I was at Stanford, so I was on campus for at least ten hours at a time, an immersive experience. The first few years I would take the light rail to BART to Caltrain to get to class. And then I would walk up Palm Drive. Walking up Palm Drive, it was kind of stunning every time. And, I love the History Corner. I love the Graduate Student ‘ounge. I love that it doesn't have the “L”. I used to get super excited when the kumquat trees were fruiting because I grew up with kumquats in Southern California and love them and I would try to pick a couple. 

Because we don't have offices as grad students, I was constantly moving around. I was in the library, I spent a lot of time working outside. And that's best for me, to be outside. 

I would just always have this feeling of, “I can't believe I'm here. I can't believe that I get to do this.” There's nothing else like it. I felt very, very lucky.