James T. Sears specializes in research in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender issues in education, curriculum studies, and queer history. He earned an undergraduate degree in history from Southern Illinois University, a graduate degree in political science from the University of Wisconsin, and his doctorate in education and sociology from Indiana University, which awarded him its Outstanding Alumni Award. Sears is the author or editor of eighteen books, including his groundbreaking Growing Up Gay in the South as well as Lonely Hunters: An Oral History of Lesbian and Gay Southern Life (A 1998 finalist for the American Library Association gay non-fiction award) and Behind the Mask of the Mattachine (finalist for the Lambda non-fiction Book Award). He has authored The Encylopedia of Sex, Courtship and Culture: The Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries and Growing Older: The Millennial LGBTs. Sears lectures throughout the world and has taught at Harvard University, Trinity University, Indiana University, Penn State University, the College of Charleston, and the University of South Carolina. He has also been a Research Fellow at Center for Feminist Studies at the University of Southern California, a Fulbright Senior Research Southeast Asia Scholar on sexuality and culture, and a Research Fellow at the University of Queensland.