Department of History

Phil Tiemeyer

Associate Professor in History

Director of Security Studies

Office: 206 Calvin Hall
Email: tiemeyerp@ksu.edu

Tiemeyer Staff Picture

My work focuses on how gender and sexuality has interacted with other forces, such as global economic development, decolonization, technological innovation, the legal system, the labor movement, and the United States’ growing global influence after World War II.

My most recent book, Women and the Jet Age: A Global History of Aviation and Flight Attendants (Cornell University Press, July 2025), examines the Cold War era as a fertile moment when airlines and civil aviation expanded globally. Particularly foregrounded are how this expansion of aviation impacted areas outside the United States and Western Europe, in what were then known as the Second World and Third World. Airlines established in places like socialist Yugoslavia and postcolonial Jamaica offered unique constellations of how smaller and poorer states could use this technology to take their place as modernized societies that belonged in the cosmopolitan realm that Western societies otherwise claimed as their own.

This use of aviation to attain a state’s status as “cosmopolitan” was as much a social project as a political and economic endeavor. By foregrounding the women who worked as flight attendants at JAT Yugoslav Airlines and Air Jamaica, as well as at Western carriers like Braniff Airways and Air France, I examine the tensions these women faced when entering what was both a career that interfaced with the advanced technology of jet powered airplanes and one that was intentionally crafted to fortify traditional notions of women’s work. While they served as ambassadors of the Jet Age, these women still cared for the frail and needy, doing so with increasingly impressive high style, and increasingly sexualized good looks. The West, Europe’s socialist East, and the Global South were intensely divided by political and economic rivalries; even so, women working on the airplanes of the Jet Age were united in their experiences of discrimination. As their respective states adorned them as cosmopolitan working women, neither West, East, nor South could countenance that such women deserved equal standing with men. The corrupted “feminism” of the Jet Age stewardess had a high gloss of modernity and cosmopolitanism, without offering women true liberation.

The research behind Women and the Jet Age was enhanced by an in-residence fellowship at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC, and a Fulbright Fellowship in Belgrade, Serbia. It also served as the basis for my role as an interviewee and historical advisor for the documentary “Fly with Me” (PBS television, 2024).

My latest book is, in some ways, a globalized sequel to my first monograph, Plane Queer: Labor, Sexuality, and AIDS in the History of Male Flight Attendants (University of California Press, 2013), which examines how flight attendants in the United States combated sexism and homophobia through the eight-decade expanse of the career. Focusing on men in this profession deepens understandings of how gender discrimination operates, foregrounds instances of anti-gay workplace discrimination, and highlights how advocacy for disability rights—especially involving workers with HIV/AIDS—has been central to America's civil rights legacy. Plane Queer won the 2015 John Boswell Prize for outstanding book in the field of LGBT history, awarded by the American Historical Association's Committee on LGBT History.

Select Publications

Women and the Jet Age: A Global History of Aviation and Flight Attendants. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, July 2025.

Plane Queer: Labor, Sexuality and AIDS in the History of Male Flight Attendants. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.

"Jet Age Feminism: Emilio Pucci, Mary Wells, and the Braniff Airways Stewardess of the 1960s," Journal of the Research Institute for the History of the Global Arms Transfer, v. 8, 67-82, July 2019.

"Launching a Non-Aligned Airline: JAT Yugoslav Airways between East, West, and South, 1945-1963," Diplomatic History, 41:1, 78-103, January 2017.

"LGBTQ Issues and U.S. Foreign Relations," Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, Sept. 2016.

"Technology and Gay Identity: The Case of the Pre-World War II Male Flight Attendant." History and Technology: An International Journal, 27:2, June 2011, 155-182.

"'Male Stewardesses': Male Flight Attendants as a Queer Miscarriage of Justice." Genders, 45, Spring 2007.

Affiliations

  • Director of Security Studies (2024-current)
  • Graduate Faculty
  • Security Studies Teaching Faculty
  • Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies Affiliated Faculty

Courses Taught

  • HIST 152 - History of the United States Since 1877
  • HIST 300 - Introduction to Historical Thinking
  • HIST 311 - Race and US Foreign Policy (satisfies the US Multicultural Diversity Overlay)
  • HIST 531 - The United States in the Twentieth Century
  • HIST 533 - Cold War Cultures – The US and the World in Cultural Conversation
  • HIST 586 - Advanced Seminar in History
  • HIST 810/815 - Security Studies Methodology
  • HIST 860: Cold War History: Alternative Narratives
  • HIST 928 - Seminar in American History: Cold War Cultures
  • HIST 983 - Topics in American History: Gender and Sexuality