Gender and Race Faculty

Francie Chassen-Lopez

As a historian of Latin America, with an emphasis on Mexico, the intersection of gender, race, ethnicity, and class are integral to my research as is the interrogation of power relationships. Dedicated to exploring the hidden agency of 19th century women, I recently finished the biography of Juana Catarina Romero, a mestiza (mixed race indigenous and Spanish), who rose from poverty to become an entrepreneur, philanthropist, and modernizing political boss in southern Mexico. This study, in turn, sparked an interest in the theory and methodology of feminist biography, which is one of my current topics of research.

Joseph Clark

My work is situated at the intersection of empire and race in the early modern Atlantic. Specifically, I study material relationships--including commerce, migration, environmental exchange, and the circulation of knowledge--that crossed legal and linguistic borders in order to understand how transimperial entanglements shaped local concepts of ethnicity, race, and caste.
 

Anastasia Curwood’s scholarship centers on the history of Black women’s advocacy and activism in the twentieth century.  Her current project is a biography of U.S. Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm.

Melanie Goan

I am fascinated by identity and how Americans define themselves along race, gender, and myriad other lines.  I am especially interested in women’s reform efforts at the turn-of-the-twentieth century and the ways rigidly defined gender roles both fueled and limited women’s attempts to transform their communities.  I am drawn to organizations and reform movements that creatively and strategically leveraged women’s expected role as a springboard to new opportunity and to rethink what a woman should be and do.

Kathryn Newfont

Kathryn Newfont is interested in the intersections of gender, race, and environment, especially in the history of the U.S. Mountain South.

Karen Petrone

I am a Russian and Soviet historian who has worked on issues of gender in mass dictatorships and on gendered representations in wartime and in war memory, especially focusing on soldierly masculinity.

Gerald Smith

Gerald Smith studies   twentieth century Kentucky African American history.

Akiko Takenaka is interested in the political representation of women in Japan and the United States. She is currently working on a book that explores the use of “motherhood” in peace activism in postwar Japan.
 
 
 
Race and especially gender have been a common theme in my research. My first book demonstrated how honor for women in early modern Spain was more similar to male honor than we had previously suspected, although still different in important ways. My current book project explores the impact of the use of soft drugs in early modern western Europe. Because chocolate, coffee, tea, tobacco, opium, and sugar all came from abroad, they all represented European consumers smoking, drinking, or otherwise ingesting artefacts from foreign cultures, raising all sorts of anxieties about how the racialized aspects of these exotic cultures – as Europeans imagined them – might affect the bodies and minds of the Europeans consuming the drugs.
 

I use the lens of black organizational life to examine modern Black history, sports history, and intellectual history. 

Tammy Whitlock is an Associate Professor of Modern Britain with special interests in the history of Crime, Gender and Medicine.  She enjoys working with undergraduates  in historical methods, capstone projects and independent work.