Teaching

I came to Rhodes to offer courses in the history of early America, including a new first-year seminar on the American Revolution and upper division seminars on Colonial America and on the Early Republic.  Rhodes has also offered me the opportunity to develop social history courses in my particular fields of interest: “Poverty and Poor Relief in America,” the history of “Childhood in America,” and a course on southern women’s experiences called “Black and White Women in the South.”  Most semesters also find me teaching in the core humanities course, “The Search for Values.”  I particularly enjoy working with first year students as they negotiate new writing expectations, a host of campus and community activities, and sleep deprivation.

Research

Currently I am engaged in trying to document and interpret the role that southern women, both African American and white, played in advancing racial opportunity in Memphis in the half-century following World War II.  Some of that work appeared in Throwing Off the Cloak of Privilege: White Southern Women in the Civil Rights Era (University Press of Florida, 2004) for which I also served as editor.  I am at work on a documentary project using memoirs and oral histories of African-American women in the civil rights movement.  This collection will appear in the Women and Social Movements database (Alexander Street Press).  During the 1990s I labored on an interpretive work which placed popular children’s books in the context of the social and cultural milieu of their day.  That work, American Children’s Literature and the Construction of Childhood, was published by Twayne in 1998.

Rhodes and Beyond

My daughter graduated from Rhodes in 1990, the year before I joined the faculty, so I think I understand campus life from both the perspective of a parent and a professor.  I love living in Memphis.  After a childhood spent in rural Ohio and early adult years in various small cities in Arkansas, I find there is much more to do here – theatre, opera, blues, river walks, exhibits – than I can possibly experience.  My husband and I enjoy eating out, walking our Midtown neighborhood, reading and cooking.