Department of History
Coor Hall - 4th Floor
Arizona State University
P.O.Box 874302
Tempe, AZ 85287
Phone: 480-965-5778
Fax: 480-965-0310 Department Email: history@asu.edu Advising Email: historyadvisor@asu.edu Graduate Email: Graduate.History@asu.edu
Professor Gray’s research interests are focused on the Great Lakes Basin and more generally on the U.S.-Canadian borderlands. Her work deals with the interplay of place, race, and gender, and the role of memory in the construction of identity. Gray is the author of The Yankee West: Community Life on the Michigan Frontier (1996), a co-edited volume, The American Midwest: Essays on Regional History (2001), and a number of essays. At present, she is completing Lines of Descent: Family Stories from the North Country, a multi-generational biography of a mixed-race family (Odawa, white), based on an array of personal narratives, including diaries, memoirs, and oral interviews with descendants (forthcoming from the University of North Carolina Press). She is also at work on Great Lakes Frontier: Michigan, 1650-1920, for the Indiana University Press series on the frontier histories of the states of the trans-Appalachian West. Her most recent publication is “Writing Michigan History from a Transborder Perspective,” forthcoming in a special double issue on the Great Lakes Basin for the Michigan Historical Review. Gray has held major fellowships from the N.E.H. and the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University. In 2000, she was a visiting professor at the John F. Kennedy Center for North American Studies at the Free University of Berlin.
Teaching Interests and Courses
Gray began her career as a teacher as Head of the Department of English, Happy Grove High School, Hector’s River, Jamaica, after which she headed for graduate school at the University of Chicago. After receiving the doctorate, she taught first at Middlebury College before coming to ASU in 1991. At ASU, Gray has taught a number of graduate and undergraduate courses in nineteenth-century U.S. history, with an emphasis on the history of women and gender. She has been involved in several curricular innovations, such as developing HST 300: Historical Inquiry, the methods course for the major in history at ASU. At the graduate level, she served as coordinator for a team-taught course in gender theory and methodology, “Representation and Lived Experience.” At present, she is the ASU coordinator for a joint ASU-York University initiative to develop a graduate seminar of the history of the U.S.-Canadian borderlands. With York colleague, Colin Coates, she will teach a pilot collaborative seminar in the fall of 2007. Gray is the recipient of several awards for teaching, including the 2003 Oregon-California Trails Association Educators’ Award and the 2005 ASU Women Faculty Mentoring Award, and a number of nominations for other ASU prizes.
Professional Service Activities
In the past five years, Gray’s service commitments have been focused on two areas: co-editorship of Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies and expert witness in a Great Lakes Indian treaty-rights case. As part of her work for the journal and as an extension of her own research interest in scholarly editing, she has worked closely with the ASU Scholarly Publishing Program in developing an internship in journals editing and various individual editing projects for graduate and undergraduate students. As expert witness for U.S. v. Michigan (2006), Gray produced a report, “Article 13 in the 1836 of Treaty of Washington and Land Use in the Cession, 1836 to the Present.” In addition, she is a frequent referee for various journals and publishers. Gray’s recent service at ASU has been mostly in the area of search committees—five within the last five years, including the search for departmental chair.
