About me
I have been privileged to serve as Professor of History and Women’s & Gender Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay since January 1999. I enjoy teaching and believe that education matters—not just in order to earn better money, get a job, please one’s parents, or because one has to do something as a young adult. Education matters because it makes us better capable of the self- and external reflection necessary for personal success and for the success of a participatory democracy.
Since earning my Ph.D. in History from the University of Iowa, my scholarship has centered on historical questions and debates about who is fit to participate in civic life. I began my career by analyzing women’s antifeminist activism during the post-WWI Red Scare (UnAmerican Womanhood: Anti-Radicalism, Anti-Feminism, and the First Red Scare). My newest book is Beyond the Miracle Worker: The Remarkable Life of Anne Sullivan Macy and Her Extraordinary Friendship with Helen Keller (Beacon Press). My earlier book, The Radical Lives of Helen Keller (New York University Press), has just been released in paperback. NYUP also published my edited collection Helen Keller: Selected Writings. Very recently I collaborated on the exciting new 3 volume Encyclopedia of American Disability History (Facts on File).
What’s next? Wait and see! Something at the intersection of women’s twentieth-century public life, nationalism, disability, civic fitness, race, and reproduction (it’s a busy intersection with no stoplight).