Jennifer Tucker, Founding Director and Professor of History
Jennifer Tucker is a professor of history at Wesleyan University and the founding director of Wesleyan’s Center for the Study of Guns & Society, established in 2022 as a hub for pioneering interdisciplinary research, teaching, and scholarly convenings on firearms history.
Tucker is an expert on the history of firearms, technology, law, violence, and culture. Her historical research explores firearms as industrial and commercial products, including firearms engineering, design, and ballistics lethality. She also studies the labor, manufacturing, and environmental impacts of firearms manufacture; state gun regulations in the 18th and 19th centuries; and global gun violence, public health, and policy.
Tucker co-edited the book, A Right to Bear Arms? The Contested Role of History in Contemporary Debates on the Second Amendment (Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2017), which has been cited in amicus briefs and Supreme Court opinions. She has written widely in academic and media outlets, including CNN, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Conversation, and MSNBC, about current debates over the history of the Second Amendment. Her writings on firearms have appeared in scholarly journals including The Journal of Modern History, Technology and Culture, Victorian Review, The Journal of the History of Behavioral Sciences, and UC Davis Law Review.
At Wesleyan, she teaches courses including “Introduction to Guns & Society,” “Reenacting Justice: Homicide in American Westerns & Law,” and “Visualizing Firearms History: Project-Based Approaches.”
Tucker engages nationally and internationally with museum professionals on gun-history related public history projects and is a member of the American Historical Association and the National Council on Public History. She is a former Marshall Scholar, Fulbright Senior Scholar in the UK, and Senior Research Associate at the Science Museum in London. Her research has been recognized and supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council, among other organizations. She is a member of the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium and a Commissioner on a new Lancet Commission on Global Gun Violence and Health.
Joseph Slaughter, Associate Director
Joseph Slaughter is assistant professor of history at Wesleyan University. His research and teaching focuses on how religious movements and businesses have shaped American capitalism and warfare. Currently, he is working on a project that examines the religious lives of the nineteenth century Connecticut River Valley gun manufacturers.
Slaughter’s courses at Wesleyan explore how North American cultures have shaped the history of firearms in the United States. In “War and Religion in Early America,” students analyze the different ways indigenous and colonial cultures conceptualized and utilized matchlock and flintlock firearms during an era of rapid technological change. “God and Guns” investigates how gun culture has shaped American religion, and in turn, how religious belief and practice has conditioned cultural attitudes towards firearms in America.
Slaughter earned his Ph.D. in U.S. History from the University of Maryland and M.A. in National Security and Strategic Studies from the Naval War College. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, he twice deployed as a C-2 Greyhound pilot on the USS Harry S. Truman and served two additional deployments as a catapult and arresting gear officer on the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Deidre Goodrich, Program Coordinator
Deidre Goodrich is the Program Coordinator for the Center for the Study of Guns & Society. She manages the Center’s administrative functions including grants, budgets, conferences, undergraduate student researchers and the Center’s new home on campus, Horgan House.
Goodrich brings a broad range of professional experience to the Center: grant writing and management, event planning, public relations, marketing, budget management, and higher education fundraising. She has an MBA from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a BA in English from Dartmouth College.
