• Rachel Devlin
  • Rachel Devlin
  • Professor of History
  • Degree: Ph.D. Yale University, 1998
  • Rutgers : At Rutgers since 2011
  • Specialty: Modern US: Women's and Gender History
  • Office: 311C Van Dyck Hall
  • Phone: 848-932-8513
  • Research Interests: My scholarly interests are in the cultural politics of girlhood, sexuality, and race in the Postwar United States. My recent book, A Girl Stands at the Door: The Generation of Young Women who Desegregated America's Schools (Basic, 2018) considers the disproportionate number of girls who filed lawsuits prior to Brown v. Board of Education, and who were desegregation "Firsts" at historically white schools in the early nineteen sixties.

 

COURSES

Undergraduate

  • 512:381 Women in American History II
  • 512:313 Childhood in America: The Colonial Period to the Present
  • 512:225 Sexuality in America: The Colonial Era to the Present.
  • 512:104 Development of U.S. II
  • 506:401 The 1950s

Graduate

  • 510:559 U.S. History: 1850 to the Present
  • 510:561 The History of Sexuality and Reproduction

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

 

  • A Girl Stands at the Door:  The Generation of Young Women who Desegregated America's Schools, Basic Books, 2018
  • Relative Intimacy:  Fathers, Adolescent Daughters, and Postwar American Culture, Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 2005
  • “The Oedipal Age:  Postwar Psychoanalysis Reinterprets the Adolescent Girl,” Miriam Forman-Brunell and Leslie Paris, eds., Girls’ History and Culture Reader (University of Illinois, 2011)
  • “’Acting Out the Oedipal Wish’:  Father-Daughter Incest and the Sexuality of Adolescent Girls in the United States, 1941-1965” The Journal of Social History (Spring, 2005)
  • “Female Juvenile Delinquency and the Problem of Sexual Authority in America, 1945-1965,” in Sherrie Inness, ed., Delinquents and Debutantes: Twentieth Century Girls’ Cultures (reprint, originally Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, 1997)
  • “Re-Reading Sex:  Battles Over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth Century America,” Reviews in American History (March, 2006)

AWARDS

  • Darlene Clark Hine Award, Organization of American Historians, Honorable Mention, 2019
  • Southern Regional Council/Lillian Smith Book Award, 2019
  • Fellow, The American Council of Learned Societies, 2015-2016
  • Fletcher Fellowship, The Alphonse Fletcher, Sr. Fellowship Program, The W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University, 2009-2010
  • Fellow, The Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, Harvard University, 2008-2009
  • Sexuality Research Fellowship, Social Sciences Research Council, 2000