Gender and Sexuality in History
This thematically based cluster cuts across temporal, geographical, and political boundaries by bringing together scholars who examine gender and sexuality both as categories of identity and as analytical tools, to ask broader questions about historical processes. Faculty members in this cluster employ gender as a category of analysis to explore how different societies have historically defined and preserved (economically, politically, culturally and socially) the categories of ‘man’ and ‘woman’, how language shapes power relationships–in both personal and institutional contexts–and how other vectors of identity (like race, class, and nation) are historically intertwined with questions of gender and sexuality. Some faculty operating within this cluster also investigate how sex (as a biological category) and sexuality (as a set of human practices) are historically constructed, often drawing on the interdisciplinary theories/methods of queer and sexuality studies. Cluster members welcome graduate students who are interested in the significant roles of gender and sexuality in society.
Undergraduate Courses:
HIST 258 American Indian History
HIST 307 Latino Communities of the U.S.
HIST 308 History of American Indians in the US South
HIST 320 History of the Atlantic World
HIST 322 History of the Iberian World
HIST 324 European Society in the Industrial Age
HIST 326 History of the Caribbean to Emancipation
HIST 330 Women in Ancient Greece and Rome
HIST 337 War and European Society in the Twentieth Century
HIST 369 The United States, 1820-1860
HIST 406 The Era of the French Revolution and Napoleon, 1715-1815
HIST 407 History of France since 1815
HIST 450 The Old South
HIST 461 History of American Women
HIST 473 History of Modern American Women
HIST 475 Empire and History
HIST 476 Sex and Sexuality in History
HIST 477 Women in Modern European History
Graduate Courses:
HIST 601 Colonial North America
HIST 628 Historiography
HIST 643 Reading Seminar in European History from Renaissance to French Revolution
HIST 644 Reading Seminar in European History since the French Revolution
HIST 678 Comparative Border Studies
HIST 679 Topics in Comparative Border Studies
Associated Faculty members:
Sara Alpern received her Ph. D. from the University of Maryland, College Park, M.A. from U.C.L.A., and B.A. from Western Reserve University. She specializes in U. S. Women's History, Biography, and late 19th and 20th Century U. S. History. Her research interests and publications within those fields include biographies, the history of women in business, the effects of woman suffrage, women in management, women in banking, Jewish women in U. S. history, women in advertising, and eating disorders among women. Harvard University Press published Alpern's biography of Freda Kirchwey, the CEO of the journal, The Nation. Alpern was co-editor and contributor to an award winning book entitled, The Challenge of Feminist Biography: Writing the Lives of Modern American Women. In 1979 she introduced the first course in U.S. Women's History at Texas A&M University where she helped start a Women's Studies Program which has grown from 4 courses to a major. She was instrumental in solidifying a Women's Faculty Network (WFN) at TAMU and forged the ongoing WFN Mentoring Program.
Cynthia Bouton is a social and cultural historian focusing on early modern and Revolutionary Europe and the Atlantic. She studies the ways that inequities in access to basic subsistence needs—often linked to status/class, gender, race/ethnicity, patronage/political relations, and location—have influenced responses to suffering (both the threat of it and strategies to alleviate it). Her first book studied responses to a subsistence crisis in 1775 France, several articles explored the history of the politics of provisioning in France from the 17th to the 19th centuries, and her second book analyzed 19th- and 20th-century cultural and political engagements with an episode of social violence over food security. Her next book, “Subsistence, Society, and Culture in the Atlantic World in the Eighteenth Century and Age of Revolution,” studies staple food production, marketplace interaction, entangled Atlantic trade networks, and government policies to understand adaptations to the “Atlanticization” of food regimes in the French, Spanish, and British Atlantic during the 18th century and revolutionary era.
Felipe Hinojosa earned his Ph.D. from the University of Houston in 2009 and began teaching at Texas A&M University that same year. His teaching and research interests include Latina/o history, religion, comparative race and ethnicity, gender, and social movements. He is particularly interested in how Latina/o religious identities and cultures have operated within discourses of power and how they have helped shape cultural, political, and faith-informed activism in twentieth century America. In 2010 he was awarded a “First Book Grant for Minority Scholars” from the Louisville Institute and is currently working on his manuscript titled, “Quiet Riots: Faith, Activism, and Identity Among Latina/o Mennonites, 1932-1982.”
Angela Pulley Hudson is a specialist in American Indian history, with a particular interest in southeastern Indian ethnohistory. Her broad areas of research are the ethnogeography of indigenous North Americans, the intersection of American Indian and African American experiences, and the role of American Indians in U.S. popular culture. Her recent book, Creek Paths and Federal Roads: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves and the Making of the American South (2010), investigates the delineation of borders and paths between and across the Indian nations of the interior South from the Revolution to Removal. Her current project explores the phenomenon of interethnic impersonation and gendered performance in antebellum America by tracing the life and career of two successful “Indian” stage performers. She earned her PhD in American Studies in 2007 from Yale University and joined the faculty at A&M the same year.
Ada Palmer is a cultural and intellectual historian focusing on the long-durée evolution of ideas and mentalities. She specializes in the early modern period, particularly the Italian Renaissance and Humanist reception of classical philosophy, but she also works on ancient, medieval and modern intellectual history. She completed her doctorate at Harvard University in Spring of 2009. She has studied extensively in Italy, and her research interests include Renaissance social and scientific theories of gender, sexuality and madness, the history of heterodoxy, atheism, skepticism and freethought and their strong associations with sodomy and homosexuality in the pre-modern world. She has recently finished a project on the reception of Lucretius in the Renaissance, and is co-author of The Recovery of
Classical Philosophy in the Renaissance, a Brief Guide along with her advisor, James Hankins.
James Rosenheim (Ph.D. Princeton University, 1981) teaches courses on early modern British history and on sex and sexuality in history. His research focuses on the social and cultural history of Restoration and early eighteenth-century England. He has published two books on aristocratic society and culture in that era and has also published articles on the operation of local government and authority and an edition of a late seventeenth-century magistrate’s notebook. His current research project, “Singular Subjects: Unmarried Men in England 1650-1750,” focuses on the phenomena and meanings of bachelorhood and widowerhood, emphasizing the light that the history of the unmarried man sheds on the history of courtship and marriage, gender and sexuality, kinship and the family. This study employs sources that include family correspondence and diaries, sermons and conduct books, financial accounts and legislation, and poetry, drama, and novels.
Rebecca Hartkopf Schloss teaches courses in Atlantic World History, Modern France, and the Caribbean. Her first project, Sweet Liberty: The Final Days of Slavery in Martinique, (2009), focuses on the relationship between Martinique and continental France and the construction of racial, class, gender and national identities during the first half of the nineteenth century. Her second project, France at the Edges: Life in France’s Atlantic Port Cities, 1760-1830, explores connections among French Atlantic port cities in the Americas, the Caribbean, Africa and Europe during the so-called Age of Empire. She earned her PhD in History at Duke University in 2003 and joined the faculty at TAMU the same year.
Philip Smith received a Ph.D. from Texas A&M University in 2007. His dissertation “Persistent Borderland: Freedom and Citizenship in Territorial Florida” looks at the Florida’s diverse Indian, African, and Caribbean heritage during the antebellum period, and it has expanded to also include the New South era. His research interests are the options for inclusion and exclusion for non-whites in the Florida Territory and later in what he calls Caribbean Florida. The options included degrees of citizenship for free blacks to rebellion by Indians and Africans during the antebellum years to limited assimilation or separation during the New South era. At the center of his research interests are the legacy of Spanish Florida and Indian resistance to removal. Though specific to Florida, aspects of Spanish and Caribbean colonial definitions of race and citizenship are common to broader Gulf Coast studies and the greater southeast.
Julia Erin Wood received her PhD in History and African American Studies from Yale University in 2011, and began teaching at Texas A&M University in the fall of 2011. Her current work is a transnational history analyzing the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), its relationship with international liberation struggles, and the place of Cold War politics in defining domestic civil rights from 1960 through the early 1970s. While the civil rights movement has typically been historicized as a southern and/or national phenomenon, it can be more fully understood as a transnational movement. There were symbiotic relationships between freedom struggles in the United States and in decolonizing countries, with peoples and events around the world inspiring and affecting one another. Throughout the mid-twentieth century, a cross-continental dialogue of race and rights emerged, and the civil rights movement needs to be placed within this transnational context. Wood argues that SNCC demanded social change within and beyond the borders of the United States, and that a better understanding of SNCC furthers the internationalization of U.S. history, and a new retelling of the Black freedom struggle. More broadly, she is interested in transnational United States history, investigating the ways in which local, national, and international histories are intertwined. She also examines the intersections of race, class, and gender in United States history. More broadly, I am interested in transnational United States history, investigating the ways in which local, national, and international histories are intertwined.