Kinsey, Alfred Charles (1894–1956)

US sexologist and zoologist who published controversial but ground breaking research on the subject of human sexuality, following interviews with over 18,000 men and women.

Many misconceptions, social-class differences, and wide variations in practice and expectations have been discovered as a result of Kinsey's work.

Kinsey was born in Hoboken, New Jersey and studied at Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine, graduating with a BSc 1916 before obtaining a PhD from Harvard University 1920. He was appointed assistant professor of zoology at Indiana University 1920 after a brief spell as a lecturer at Harvard, and was made a full professor 1929. His research during the 1930s was on gall wasps and he published Edible Plants of Eastern North America (1943). It is, however, for his work on human sexual behaviour that he is best known. In 1942 he founded the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University and published two controversial studies: Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female (1953).