“Ahead of Her Time,” review essay on historian Lucy Maynard Salmon for Women’s Review of Books (November, 2001)

“Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang,” review essay on feminism and female gun ownership, in Women’s Review of Books (March 2001)

“Nation and Reunification,” review essay on Progressive-era patriotic pageantry in Reviews in American History (March, 2000)

“The Problem of the Color Line: Segregation, Politics and Historical Writing,” Cultural Critique no. 38 (winter, 1997-98)

“Death-defying Women,” review essay on women and organized crime in Europe and the United States for Women’s Review of Books (March, 1997)

Co-editor and co-author of introduction (with Henry Abelove and Richard Ohmann), of Radical Teacher (#45), special queer studies issue (spring, 1997)

“‘I’ll Go the Limit and Then Some:’ Gun Molls, Desire and Danger in the 1930’s,” Feminist Studies (spring, 1995)

Work in Progress

Books

Problems and Methods in Recent American History (anthology under contract to the University of Georgia Press, be delivered July 15, 2010.) With Renee Romano, Oberlin College Department of History, I co-edit a monograph series in United States history for the University of Georgia Press, “Contemporary America: Since 1970,” (Derek Krissof, acquisitions editor.) The series is to be inaugurated with this anthology, a co-edited collection of articles on the challenges attendant to, and the development of new methods for, writing the history of the recent past. I will co-author an introduction with Renee, and co-edit an article on the problem of writing from a second-wave feminist archive donated by living activists.

Children First: Feminism, the Reagan Revolution and the Politics of Pornography, 1968-1990

This new book project explores the political history of movements to suppress pornography during the Carter, Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. It centers anti-pornography campaigns mounted, and sometimes opposed, by feminists; and family values campaigns that were crucial to grass roots conservative attempts to implement a Christian social agenda at the end of the twentieth century. (Significant research completed in the Reagan and Carter Presidential Libraries, the New York Public Library, the GLBT Historical Society (San Francisco), Duke University Special Collections and the Schlesinger Library, Cambridge, MA.

The Living Present: William Dunning, The Civil War and a Modern Historical Imagination

This book-length study of William Archibald Dunning, a controversial scholar of the Civil War and Reconstruction asks: Why do people become historians? And why do they write the histories that they do? In answering these questions, “The Living Present” addresses the ideological stakes behind the development of political history as a field by examining its origins in the study of slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction between 1877 and 1922.

External Awards and Prizes

Audre Lorde article prize by the Committee on Lesbian and Gay History (American Historical

Association affiliate society), 2007-08

Albert J. Beveridge Research Grant, American Historical Association, 1988

Charlotte Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship, Woodrow Wilson Foundation, 1987

Invited Talks

“Sexual Revolutions: Pornography and Politics in the Age of Reagan,” Yale University Department of History and the Program in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, New Haven, CT, October 23, 2008.

Keynote speaker for the Hamline University’s Symposium on the Humanities, “Feminist Politics and the White House,” St. Paul, MN, March 31-April 1, 2008. Delivered two talks: “Was There a Sexual Counterrevolution? Reinventing the ‘Crime’ of Pornography in the Age of Reagan;” and “Before Hillary, There Was Midge: Feminist Politics and the Carter White House.”

“The Sexual Counterrevolution: Feminism, the Reagan Administration and the ‘Crime’ of Pornography,” invited talk, Pennsylvania State University Departments of History and Women’s Studies, State College, PA, October 10-11, 2007.

“Methods for a Queer Political History,” invited talk sponsored by the Rainbow Center (University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut, November 5, 2003).

“Why Queer Studies in American Studies?” American Studies graduate symposium, Yale University, New Haven, CT April 22, 2003.

Visiting scholar, History Series, the Salisbury House Cultural Center, Des Moines, IA (December, 2002)

Professional Affiliations

Organization of American Historians (Merle Curti Book Prize Committee, 2005-06)

Berkshire Conference of Women Historians (Nominating Committee, 2003 – present)

American Studies Association

American Historical Association (Beveridge-Dunning Book Prize Committee, 2008-2011; chair, 2009-10)

American Association of University Professors