Women's history:
Some courses I teach focus
specifically on women in U.S. history. As a social historian, I am interested in
how women's daily lives have changed over time, how women have organized to
shape the course of historical events, and how the institutions of family,
church, marriage, law, education, medicine, science, art, and economy help
organize (and are organized by) gender. As a cultural historian, I am
particularly interested in the meaning of gender and the nature of sexuality. I
am also interested in the ways that gender as lived experience and as ideology
has combined with other key components of social experience (such as race, class
and national identity) to create historically- and culturally- specific notions
of human reality.
Examples of women's history courses I teach are:
African-American Women's History Through
Autobiography 3400:469/569
Course description and objectives: In this course, students
will become familiar with the major issues and debates within African-American
women's history. They will be expected to acquire a historical perspective on
race and gender, as cultural and historical constructs rather than as things
immutable, natural, or rooted in physical differences. In addition to exposing
the changing historical conditions under which American women of African
heritage have labored for self-definition and autonomy, this course seeks to
illuminate the many ways raced and gendered identities have been invented and
reinvented in the American context. While autobiographical writings (such as
slave narratives) form the core, some fictional as well as nonfictional
additional sources will help students become aware of the main political and
social issues at stake in each period of time under study.
History
of Women in the U.S. (HST 350-001)
Course
description and objectives:
Although
this course seeks to focus student attention on women in American history, it
also takes as its goal an examination of the ways in which gender, as a
fundamental dimension of American society, has changed over the last four
centuries. Gender, for the purposes
of this course, is not understood to be a list of qualities associated with
women or with men, nor merely a level of personhood, but a dynamic and
internally-conflicted relation framing the construction of culture, politics and
society. When so defined, it is
clear that political changes, social developments and economic shifts can not be
thoroughly comprehended apart from a consideration of gender both as an
experience and as interpretations of experience.
Likewise, since gender is not a transhistorical essence but a
historically-contingent human relation, gender is ill-understood when considered
apart from the ways in which it is read with and through class and race or the
specific historical contexts in which it arises.
Through an encounter with a variety of historical methodologies and
perspectives, this course takes as its aim an integration of students’
understanding of American history with current thinking in the academy about
gender, race, class and historical change.
Women,
History, and Film (Special Topics:
HST 340)
Course
description and objectives:
Using
visual as well as textual sources, this course exposes students to major ideas
and debates in feminist film theory. Students
will learn to bring a historical perspective and theoretical sophistication to
their analysis of the representation of women, audiences, and popular culture in
the twentieth century.