Since 1970 modern feminism has profoundly transformed scholarly pursuits. In the academy and outside of it, feminists have struggled to improve the lives and status of women, campaigned for gender justice and equality, re-imagined the meanings of womanhood, and challenged existing symbolic binaries of sex, gender, and sexualities. Along with other academic disciplines, history has been profoundly changed by feminism. By asking a simple question: “What about women?” historians reconfigured the study of past and present, bringing to light a range of new topics, questions, and modes of analysis that have reshaped how we understand society and culture. As historical scholarship has demonstrated, to understand and explain the complexity of women’s place in society and their contributions to politics and culture, women cannot be studied in isolation. Employing gender—the association of social roles and expectations with biographical differences—as a central category of analysis, historians now analyze social, cultural, and political developments in significant new ways, shedding light on the human condition itself in a global and historical context.

The study of women and gender is a major focus of the Department of History. Fifteen faculty members are engaged in these issues across time and space, in diverse societies, ethnicities, races, and cultures. The study of women and gender is truly global, encompassing Europe, Asia, the Americas, the Caribbean, Africa, and the Middle East. Temporally, the study of women and gender extends from antiquity to modern times and contemporary society. Methodologically, the study of women and gender is genuinely interdisciplinary, linking law, the arts, and the various disciplines of the humanities and the social sciences. For some faculty members, the study of women and gender stands at the center of their academic commitment; for others, it is part of a larger research agenda. But all faculty members who engage in this work are convinced that it is simply impossible to understand any society or culture without attention to women and gender.

Faculty Profiles

Rachel Fuchs has researched and published on women’s and gender history in modern Europe, with a focus on France.  Her six books range from Abandoned Children in France and Poor and Pregnant in Paris during the nineteenth century to Gender and Poverty in Nineteenth-Century Europe.  She has just completed a book on paternity and the family in modern France.

Monica H. Green is a historian of medicine.  She teaches courses on gender and sexuality in medieval Europe, women in science and medicine, and women’s healthcare.  Her published research has dealt primarily with the history of women’s healthcare in premodern Europe, although she also works with cross-cultural comparative studies.

Chouki El Hamel is currently finishing a book tentatively entitled Race/Color and Gender in Moroccan Slavery in which he investigates the interplay of emotions, identity, race, and gender through analysis of the concubinage system.  He regularly offers a seminar on women and gender in Africa.

Susan E. Gray is co-editor of Frontiers:  A Journal of Women Studies.  A nineteenth-century U.S. historian interested in the intersections of gender, race, identity, and place, she is completing a book entitled Lines of Descent:  Family Stories from the North Country, a multi-generational history of a mixed-race (Odawa and white) missionary family, based on an array of personal narratives, including oral interviews with descendants.

Gayle Gullett, co-editor of Frontiers:  A Journal of Women Studies, is particularly interested in gender, social movements, and identity.  Her publications include Becoming Citizens:  The Emergence and Development of the California Women’s Movement, 1880-1911 (University of Illinois, 2000).  She is currently investigating the relationships among black and white women’s movements, print communities, and modernity in early twentieth-century Los Angeles.

Christiane Harzig has global research and teaching interests in gender and migration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  Her book, Peasant Maids-City Women traces the migration experience of women from the European countryside to urban America.  Another work focuses on the history of European and Canadian immigration policies.  She is currently researching global migration systems of domestic workers.

Catherine Kaplan writes about politics and culture in the early American republic.  Her forthcoming book, Men of Letters in the Early Republic:  Creating Forums of Citizenship, 1795-1811, explores alternate visions of manhood and investigates the contributions of women to the era’s cultural life.  She is currently researching the life and work of Elizabeth Seton, who helped to shaped female Catholic spirituality and schooling.

Asuncion Lavrin’s past and current research addresses the personal and social norms and transgressions of women and men in colonial Mexico.  A book manuscript and many recent articles focus on nuns and conventual life, and she is now considering the world of friars and masculinity.  Lavrin is also the author of a landmark comparative history of feminism in three Latin American nations between 1890 and 1940. 

Laurie Manchester has examined the self-construction of a secularized Orthodox Christian masculinity in Late Imperial Russia.  Gender informs her current research, which includes an article on Russian parish clergywomen as agents of internal colonization, and a monograph on Russian men and women who traveled or migrated to China, Africa, and Latin America.

K. Lynn Stoner graduated from Indian University’s doctoral program in 1983, specializing in Latin American history.  Her research interests include women’s history in Cuba in the early twentieth century.  Her teaching expertise ranges from U.S./Latin American diplomatic history to the colonial and modern survey courses, from Latin American film and culture to women’s history.  At the graduate level she prepares students in national-period state-building courses, as well as social, cultural, and environmental histories of the same period.

Hava Tirosh-Samuelson is a Jewish Intellectual historian who has been instrumental in forging a conversation between feminism and Jewish philosophy.   She is the editor of Women and Gender in Jewish Philosophy (2004) and the author of several essays on gender in medieval and modern Jewish philosophy and Judaism and ecofeminism.

Victoria Thompson studies gender and sexuality in modern Europe.  She is the author of The Virtuous Marketplace:  Women and Men, Money and Politics in Paris, 1830-1870 (2000), and, with Rachel Fuchs, Women in Nineteenth-Century Europe (2004).  Current research interests include domesticity and everyday life and gendered uses of urban space.

Sybil Thornton, a specialist in popular rehearsals of history, teaches courses on pre-modern Japanese and Asian history, women in Asia, comparative oral tradition, and film.  Her research focuses on three areas of traditional Japanese narrative in which women play a critical role:  late medieval Japanese epic, a Buddhist order the Jishû, whose propaganda stories appear in epics, and the Japanese period film, which continues to employ the narratological strategies of epic.

Retha M. Warnicke is a historian of early modern England.  She regularly incorporates gender analysis in her courses.  Her published research and conference presentations deal with women’s experiences, especially queenship.  A charter member of the Society for Research on Early Modern Women, she was elected its second president.

Matthew C. Whitaker’s research and teaching explores the inextricable link between gender, race, and class.  His most recent publications examine the gendered visions and expectations of social movements and grassroots activism, male and female leadership, class dynamics in African American communities, including the tension between the pursuit of material success and racial responsibility, and the potential and problems associated with coalition-building among whites and people of color.