Graduate Studies In Women's History

The women's history program at Ohio State University, home of the Journal of Women's History from 1996-2004, is committed to wide-ranging teaching and scholarship in U.S., European, and Third World history. The Department of History offers excellent support in the form of fellowships and teaching or research assistantships for all graduate students for up to six years.

Why study women's history at Ohio State?

1. Ohio State has a distinguished and diverse women's history faculty:

Donna J. Guy: Like many Latin American historians of gender trained during the 1970s, I was familiar with U.S. and European women's history, but had rarely seen research on women in Latin America. I became a specialist in gender history first by focusing on the history of Argentine women as a response to its absence in my field, and since that time I have expanded to masculinity and sexuality topics. My research topics include the history of legalized prostitution in Argentina, gender and public health and law, and gender and street children. I teach courses in Latin American women's history and sexuality studies, as well as world history courses in sexuality history at the undergraduate and the graduate levels. By training I employ interdisciplinary and cross cultural modes of analysis and my students focus their interests on Latin America, the United States, Europe and the Middle East. Travel, needlepoint, cooking, and working out at the gym are among my favorite non-academic pursuits.

Barbara A. Hanawalt: I was trained as a medieval historian with special emphasis on English social, economic, and legal history. My research and publications have always included the study of women, starting with an early article on female felons in fourteenth century England. My subsequent book on crime in fourteenth-century England also included sections on women as victims and perpetrators of felonies. Another study of medieval English peasant family contains material on women as does a study of childhood and adolescence in medieval London. My current research is a cradle to grave study of medieval London women. I have also written a number of essays on women and edited a volume on women and work in medieval and early modern England. My graduate seminars always include material on women and a number of my graduate students have completed PhD dissertations on medieval women.

Susan M. Hartmann: Trained as a modern U.S. historian before there was women's history, I was drawn to the field through my involvement in second-wave feminism.  My research and publications have investigated war, politics, policy, women's movements, religion, the suffrage movement, and native American women.  An important goal of my graduate courses in women's history is to examine U.S. women's experiences in a global context, and my graduate students have written dissertations on feminism, women and social movements, women in government, African American women, and gender and politics.  My current research explores the connections between gender and American liberalism and conservatism in post-World War II history. Beyond history, my passions are tennis and opera.

Robin E. Judd:  My PhD is in European and Jewish history from the University of Michigan, where I also studied gender history and theory.  My current research concerns Jewish ritual behavior and debates in modern Europe, and I am deeply interested in how those debates intersected with and shaped discussions concerning modern manhood and masculinity. My articles reflect this interest, as does my forthcoming book, Cutting Identities:  Jewish Rituals and German Politics.  As a professor of Jewish history, I am deeply interested in how gender influenced the modern Jewish experience, as well as how gender historiography and methodologies can recast extant Jewish historical narratives.  I have had the fortune to blend the worlds of religio-ethnic and Gender history as the co-chair for the SSHA race and ethnicity network and as an active member of the AJS women's workshop. I also am constantly learning about the politics of gender and Jewishness in my teaching outside of the academy and, more importantly, as the mother of two boys, ages 3 and 7. 

Lucy Eldersveld Murphy.  As an activist undergraduate during the 1970s, I was inspired by taking some of the first courses offered in women's history at the University of Michigan, and attended the first Berkshire Conference on the History of Women.  After some years teaching high school and working as a free-lance writer, and while taking care of two small children, I became a "non-traditional" graduate student, to find that the field of women's history had blossomed.  I teach U.S. women's and Native American history courses, in addition to other courses on frontiers and nineteenth-century U.S.  My research focuses on mixed (American Indian/European) families in the nineteenth-century Midwest.  In addition, I am involved with building an American Indian Studies program at OSU, creating an OSU Newark Earthworks Center to focus on American Indian Studies, and working with a team of faculty, students, staff, and community volunteers in an oral history project, "Discovering the Stories of Native Ohio."  I am also co-faculty adviser for the American Indian Council, the OSU Native American student group.  In my spare time, I enjoy gardening, folk music, and jazzercise.

Claire Robertson: I came of age intellectually when my two main fields of interest, African and women's studies, were taking shape.  History drew me as offering the broadest and most explanatory means for understanding our human condition, while women's studies animates my strong interest in comparative history and colonialism, in particular. Interdisciplinary views infuse all of my work, which has ranged from studying ethnobotany in connection with women's trade in Kenya to comparative slavery studies, to European women's history, and to the Caribbean, where I am working on an oral history project in Saint Lucia.  My graduate students have worked on highly varied topics: quilting in Ohio, slave dress in Jamaica, Haitian canecutting, the transfer of Berber women's strong roles to the Americas via Iberia, changes in Indian laws concerning women, the environmental impact of building the Punjabi railroad,  the sex trade in Thailand and others. I have a joint appointment in the Department of Women's Studies and graduate students in both departments.  Other interests include: fundraising for Kenyan women's groups and AIDs orphanages/schools; singing; political and environmental activism, dogs.

Stephanie J. Shaw: My research and teaching interests have always combined African American history, women’s history, social history, and labor history.  I am especially interested in the ways family, work, and community have intersected in black women's lives during different periods of history.  My first book concerned black women workers in the feminized professions during the Jim Crow era, and I am currently completing a book on slave women.  The questions I would like to answer as a historian, however, sometimes take me far afield. And so the study on slave women (which hopes to provide a life course analysis) is also sociological, anthropological, and even biological.  Occasionally, I even indulge in diversions that lead me away from black women's history, altogether.  I recently published an article on former slaves during the Great Depression, and I am currently also finishing a book of essays that seeks to reorient the ways we think about W.E.B. Du Bois and his masterwork, The Souls of Black Folk.

Birgitte Søland: I was born and grew up in Denmark where I earned my first degrees at the University of Aarhus.  Ironically, those degrees were in European literature, not history.  Facing academic unemployment in Europe, I enrolled at the University of Minnesota where I planned to study literature and history for a year.  Little did I know that twenty years later I would still be living in the U.S. or that I would end up as a professional historian!  However, at the University of Minnesota I fell in love with history, and in 1993 I received my Ph.D. in European women's history.  My research interests have focused on the social, cultural and economic history of girls and young women in the 19th and 20th centuries.  I am particularly interested in comparative history, an aspect I strongly emphasize in my teaching. Partly prompted by the adoption of my 3-year-old daughter, Anna, from Guatemala, my interests have recently turned toward the history of children and children's rights. Besides being a historian and a mom, I still love literature, and according to my friends, I'm at least a half-way decent cook.

Mytheli Sreenivas: My Ph.D. is in modern South Asian history from the University of Pennsylvania, where I also received a Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies.  From the outset of my academic training, gender has been central to my research on nineteenth and twentieth century South Asia.  My current project, which focuses on the history of marriage and families during the colonial period, foregrounds questions about women’s identity, activism, and experience.  Having just joined the History Department in Autumn 2005, I look forward to developing courses that bring together my interests in comparative women’s history, feminist theory, sexuality studies, and family history.  I hold a joint appointment with the Department of Women’s Studies.

Judy Tzu-Chun Wu:  I received my Ph.D. in History from Stanford University in 1998.  At OSU, I teach courses on the Modern U.S., Asian Americans, Immigration, women, the 1960s, and the U.S. West. My first book, Dr. Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: The Life of a Wartime Celebrity (University of California Press, February 2005), is a biography of Margaret Jessie Chung (1889-1959), the first American-born Chinese female physician.  This biography examines Margaret Chung's strategies for traversing racial, gender, and sexual boundaries of American society from the late Victorian era through the early Cold War period.  My current book project, tentatively entitled “Radical Orientalism:  Asia, Asian America, and American Social Movements,” examines the influence of Asian culture, politics, and people on American forms of radicalism from the mid-1950s through the 1970s.  During the 2005-2006 academic year, I am a Senior Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Chicago’s Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture.

Other scholars in the department are engaged in research and teaching in the areas of women's history, family history, gender history, and the history of sexuality.  These include:  Leslie Alexander (African American history); Paula Baker (modern U.S. history); Cynthia Brokaw (Chinese history); Joan Cashin (Southern history); Alice Conklin (French history); David Cressy (English history); Jane Hathaway (Islamic history); David Hoffmann (Soviet history); Hasan Jeffries (African American history); Stephen Kern (French history); and Stephanie Smith (Latin American history).

2. Ohio State has a comprehensive history faculty that offers breadth and depth to support graduate study in women's history:

Ours is a large, diverse, and comprehensive department with over 200 students currently pursuing advanced study in 17 different fields of history with 56 graduate faculty members. We offer coursework and Ph.D. fields in:
African, Ancient, East Asian, Medieval European, Latin American, Early Modern European, World, Modern European, Islamic, Russian and Eastern European, Jewish, U.S. to 1877, U.S. since 1877, Diplomatic/International, Military, African American, and Women's.

3. Ohio State has an eminent Department of Women's Studies that offers an M.A. degree and coursework that supports the women's history program:

Established in 1975, the Department of Women's Studies has sixteen core faculty members and offers one of the largest and most comprehensive curricula in the country. Among its strong areas of specialization are feminist theory, African and African American women, cultural representation, sexuality, and women's movements. In addition to the core faculty, more than forty associated graduate faculty members teach gender-focused courses in a number of departments.

4. Ohio State women's history Ph.D. recipients have succeeded in publishing and finding employment in the field of women's history:

Women's history graduates have published books and journal articles based on their dissertations and master's theses. Over the past 20 years the Department of History has placed the overwhelming majority of its Ph.D. recipients in academic positions at colleges and universities across the country.

5. Columbus, now the fifteenth largest metropolitan area in the country, is home to a flourishing women's community:

On campus, the Women's Studies Library--perhaps the best in the nation--has two bibliographers and includes an extensive collection of books, journals, and primary sources on microfilm. Resources on campus include Gender and Sexuality Services (including Women's Services, Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Student Services, and the Rape Education Program) and numerous student groups devoted to feminism and women's issues. Columbus has a large and diverse feminist community, immortalized in Nancy Whittier's Feminist Generations.

FOR INFORMATION ABOUT FELLOWSHIPS, GRADUATE ASSOCIATESHIPS, REQUIREMENTS FOR THE M.A. AND PH.D., AND APPLICATION PROCEDURES, CONTACT:

Chair, Graduate Studies Committee, Department of History, Ohio State University, 230 W. 17th Avenue, Columbus, OH 43210. The telephone is (614) 292-2674. Or visit our Prospective Graduate page. As with all of the Department of History's graduate programs, THE DEADLINE FOR RECEIPT OF ALL APPLICATION MATERIALS IS DECEMBER 1.