Education

Ph.D., History, University of Chicago, 2008

Fields of interest

I am a historian of gender, sexuality, and family in the twentieth-century United States. I have been teaching at the University of Memphis since 2008. I received a PhD in history from the University of Chicago in 2008  and a BA in history from Columbia University in 1999.

My research focuses on the politics of marriage and family. My first book, Everybody Else: Adoption and the Politics of Domestic Diversity in Postwar America (University of Georgia Press, 2014), uses adoption as a lens into how diverse men and women thought about marriage and parenthood during the post-World War II baby boom. In the book, I analyze the adoption applications of diverse couples — African American and white, working- and middle-class — who wanted to adopt children. These men and women were forced to explain what many never had to: why they wanted to become parents and how they believed a child would add to their family. Applicants described their families as essential to their sense of purpose and meaning in their everyday lives, but they also depicted them as sites where they felt acutely both the comforts of privilege and the stings of inequality. I suggest that, although we usually think of the baby boom family as an apolitical retreat from Cold War anxieties, instead it was intimately connected in the minds of ordinary people to larger political questions about race, gender, and economic inequality. 

I am currently working on a several new projects, including an oral history project on reproductive justice and a research project on adultery.

Courses taught

US since 1877; History of American Family; History of American Childhood; Reproductive Rights Movement in the US; US Historiography since 1877; History of Sexuality in the US; US post-1945

Representative publications

• “’Thou Shalt Meet Thy Sexual Needs in Marriage’: Southern Baptists and Marital Sex in the Postwar Era,” Church History (2020): 89, 125-147
• Everybody Else: Adoption and the Politics of Domestic Diversity in Postwar America (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2014)
• "Family Ideals: The Diverse Meanings of Residential Space in Chicago during the Baby Boom," Journal of Urban History 39, no. 1 (January 2013): 59-78
• "'Undesirable Relations': Same-sex Relationships and the Meaning of Sexual Desire at a Women's Reformatory during the Progressive Era," Feminist Studies 30, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 394-41