I finished my undergraduate degree at a nontraditional college, in which we were encouraged to design courses and request help from professors to explore readings.  When I entered graduate school, I was a bit confused by the intensive policing of disciplinary boundaries. I read in psychology, history, philosophy, cultural theory, and American and European literature before settling into American history with a focus on the history of education, a field by its very nature interdisciplinary. My research has concentrated ever since on the institutional organization of knowledge and the capacity of institutions to absorb the "other." Both of these concerns also have shaped my teaching.

My first book focused on Robert Hutchins, a man who challenged the organization and epistemological assumptions of the modern research university (University of Chicago) in the United States. My current project is a narrative analysis of women social science scholars in higher education in the U.S. between 1890, when women were first admitted to major graduate programs, to 1940, after women's access to academic positions had been diminishing for a decade.

I examine women's strategies for completing graduate work; their influence on the cultures of the colleges and universities that hired them; and their contributions to the developing social sciences and to public policy making at the local, state, and national levels. By examining women as the "other" in this project, navigating institutions created with the male scholar as the norm, I have become ever more aware of the multitude of ways those in power have used language, access to resources, and institutional power to protect their privilege. At the same time, it is clear that, when challenged, particularly in institutions in societies that claim to be meritocratic, protecting privilege became much more difficult to justify and, over time, to maintain.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

"Gender, Professional Knowledge, and Institutional Power: Women Social Scientists and the Research University," in The 'Woman Question' and Higher Education: Perspectives on Gender and Knowledge Production in America, ed. Ann Mari May (Edward Elgar, 2008). See website

"Women, Social Science Expertise, and the State,"Women's History Review (UK, forthcoming)

"Gender, Professional Knowledge, and Institutional Power: Women Social Scientists and the Research University," in The 'Woman Question' and Higher Education: Perspectives on Gender and Knowledge Production in America (Elgar, forthcoming)

"Berkeley Women Economists, Public Policy, and Civic Sensibility," in Civic and Moral Learning in America, ed., Donald Warren (New York: Palgrave  McMillan, 2006)

"Creative Financing in Social Science: Women Scholars and Early Research," in Women and Philanthropy in Education, ed.  Andrea Walton (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 2005)

"Gender and the Politics of Knowledge," History of Education Quarterly 43 (summer 2003): 171-195.

Robert M. Hutchins: Portrait of an Educator (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

CONTACT

Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Campus Box 1078
McMillan Hall, Room 210
Washington University
St. Louis, MO 63130
(314) 935-7479 - office
(314) 935-8678 - fax
Email