Christine Stansell

Stein-Freiler Distinguished Service Professor in United States History and the College
Ph.D. Yale University 1979

FIELD SPECIALTIES

Women’s and gender history; Antebellum U.S. social and political history; American cultural history; History of human rights and post-catastrophic societies.

BIOGRAPHY

Christine Stansell is a leading historian of American women, with interests in women’s and gender history, antebellum U.S. social and political history, American cultural history, and how societies reconstruct themselves after catastrophes. After graduating from Princeton University (1971), she earned a Ph.D. in American Studies at Yale University (1979) and joined the Princeton History Department in 1982. She will begin teaching at the University of Chicago in Autumn 2007. Beginning with her years as a graduate student at Yale in the early 1970s, Professor Stansell helped to establish and further the “second wave” of women’s history and gender studies. Her first book, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York 1789-1860 (1986), explored the streets, tenements, dance halls, and sweatshops of antebellum New York City to reveal the central role working-class women played in the city’s history. At the same time she worked in the new field of the history of sexuality, collaborating with Ann Snitow and Sharon Thompson to publish the groundbreaking collection Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality (1983). Her most recent book, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (2000), weaves together the lives of the influential group of writers, artists, and political radicals who lived in Greenwich Village in the years between 1890 and 1920 to deliver a wide-ranging account of left-wing politics, avant-garde art, intimate relationships, and American social history at the opening of the 20th century. Professor Stansell writes and reviews widely for The New Republic and other journals of opinion on subjects ranging from African-Americans in New York City and the painter James McNeill Whistler to Theodore Roosevelt, the history of love, and 1960s feminism. Most recently, she wrote for The New Republic about the Supreme Court’s Carhartu decision (on partial birth abortion) and on women in the US Congress. She had been the recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1993-94), a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey (1990-91), and the Mary Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2006-07).

Current Project

Professor Stansell is currently at work on Feminism, a history of feminism from 1792-2002 to be published as a Modern Library volume for Random House. Future projects will focus on social and political activity across the color line in antebellum America and England, the history of motherhood, the home front in World War II and post-catastrophic societies.

Teaching Interests

Professor Stansell will teach courses for undergraduates on American women from the 16th to the early 20th century; the history of feminism; motherhood; and the history of sexuality. She will offer graduate seminars on gender history, the post-Civil War period, the history of sexuality, and metropolitan life; the latter is a writing/research workshop that trains students to write about cities.

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SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century, Owl Books

City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860, University of Illinois Press

Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality (New feminist library), Monthly Review Press

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