Sabbatical: 2008-2009

Teaching

Research invigorates teaching. If I approach students as an historian at work, who explores a question rather than "having the answers," it opens up the processes of investigation and interpretation. When, in class, we venture into a census manuscript, a firsthand narrative, or set of photographs, students share in the sense of discovery. As we raise conceptual questions regarding the evidence, and think them through aloud, students learn the practice of critical thinking. My courses emphasize engagement with archival evidence such as letters, diaries, oral histories, memoirs, autobiographies, photographs, art, advertisements, films, government documents, land plats, and folksongs. A passion for research, shared with students, energizes us all. 

Research

My area of expertise is gender in the American West. Western frontiers were places of cultural convergence, marked by conquest, colonization, and the expansion of capitalism—processes that shaped gender systems in distinctive ways. Indeed, the American West was like a laboratory of gender, revealing the ways that social identities, economic life, and political order were created and contested. In addition, gender in the West has been complicated by ideological constructions of race, as well as by mythical constructions of the West itself. My research explores these dynamics, through study of communities and individuals whose lives spanned the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries.