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. 

Most recently I wrote an essay on the ways that Mormon women at Winter Quarters contested the reach of patriarchal authority over their daily lives, redefining their position within a theocratic community. Last year, I worked with a student team to create the interpretive texts for an exhibition of Edward S. Curtis photographs of American Indians. We explored the ways that Curtis’ images of American Indians expressed an anti-modernist sensibility that reinforced colonialist narratives about Native peoples. We placed Curtis’ photographs in dialogue with Native uses of photography from the same period, which conveyed a rich array of modern Indian identities. The year previous, I published an investigation of how one African-American woman negotiated the borders of gender and race within a rural Montana community, and how that community encoded social boundaries within the memory they constructed about her place in their midst. This essay won the Jensen-Miller Prize for the best article on women in the American West for 2005.

Other Interests

I love the Rocky Mountain West and the redrock desert! In younger days, I worked as a river guide in Utah and Colorado. My husband and I go hiking, camping, and boating on western rivers and mountains whenever we get the chance. Other interests? I enjoy interior decorating, and cheesy reality TV like The Apprentice.