Additional Degrees
B.A., Carleton College
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Over the long haul my primary concern has been finding ways to uncover, understand, and write about the lives of ordinary women, mainly in the American South. At present I’m curious about several subjects, including the concept of women’s culture, the meanings of honor among people who presumably had none, and relationships between history and fiction.
COURSES REGULARLY TAUGHT
Undergraduate
- 512:380,381: Women in American History
- 506:401: Seminars, such as “Male and Female in Nineteenth-Century America”
Graduate
- 510:539: Colloquium in Women’s and Gender History
- 510:549, 550: Seminar in the History of Women
PUBLICATIONS
- A Murder in Virginia: Southern Justice on Trial (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003)
- Edited with Nancy Hewitt, Visible Women: New Essays on American Activism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993)
- “A Share of Honour”: Virginia Women, 1600-1945 (Richmond: Virginia Women’s Cultural History Project, 1984)
- The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784-1860 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1984)
AWARDS
- Bancroft Prize and Berkshire Conference Prize for The Free Women of Petersburg; Guggenheim Fellowship; MacArthur Fellowship
PROFESSIONAL AFFILIATIONS
- American Historical Association
- American Studies Association
- Berkshire Conference of Women Historians
- Organization of American Historians
- Sisters in Crime
- Southern Association for Women Historians
- Southern Historical Association
- Western Association of Women Historians
