During my time at the Center, I will be working on a critical history of incest and its prohibition in the United States between the Revolution and the Civil War. While often figured as a transhistorical law of culture, I argue that the incest prohibition needs to be understood as a historically contingent phenomenon that both articulates and is articulated by specific political, social, and cultural contexts. I trace a discourse of incest through theological, legal, ethnographic, scientific, and reform domains, arguing that incest comes to structure sexual and familial relations in the post-Revolutionary United States. Incest has generally been understood as a violent sexual transgression of family and kinship, and while that aspect is part of my study, I argue that incest, in this period, was an effect of the erotic excess of affective, sentimental language. Finally, as family and nation were inextricably linked in republican and liberal discourses, the predominance of incest in a plethora of discrete domains in the early republic and antebellum periods was symptomatic of the fraught tension between kinship and the democratic state.