Department of History

RESEARCH INTERESTS

As an Americanist who specializes in African American and American Women’s history I am especially interested in issues of identity and the intersection of race, class, gender and sexuality.

COURSES REGULARLY TAUGHT

• 512:104, Development of the United States I
• 512:306, America Since 1945
• 512:366, The History of Race and Sex in America
• Race, Gender, and Nation
• Black Identity in Twentieth Century America

PUBLICATIONS

• Telling Histories: Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower, ed.  (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming 2008)
• Too Heavy A Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999)
• Let My People Go: African American 1800-1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)
• Ar’n’t I A Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W.W. Norton, 1985, 1999 [2nd ed])

IN PROGRESS

“’Can’t We All Just Get Along’: The Cultural Awakenings of the 1990’s” - This book recounts the history of the 1990’s through the lens of the decade’s mass marches and gatherings. The Million Man March, the Million Woman March, the Promise Keepers, the LGBT Marches, and the Million Mom March tell us a lot about sexuality, and the state of American race, class, and gender relations. Separately, and in conversation with each other, they allow for an in-depth analysis of subjects like coalition building, intraracial and interracial faith, marriage and family relationships. In conversation with the past they speak to the continuing processes of millennialism and post-modernism. As such they are powerfully revelatory about American identity (ies) at the turn of the twenty-first century.