Teaching

Undergraduate Lecture

This course surveys the major events of American history from the Civil War to the present. The primary theme of this course revolves around the question of how Americans and American democracy evolved as the country emerged as a political and economic superpower over the course of the twentieth century. The course follows Americans’ lives from the 1870s and ends in the post-Cold War period, tracing the challenges they faced in defining their roles in the nation and in the world.

Undergraduate Lecture/Discussion

This course surveys the history of women and gender in the American West from the colonial period to the present. To make sense of the change that occurs in these four centuries—whether this is “progress” and for whom?—this class will focus on the histories of women (and often men) who have inhabited what we now think of as the West. How did discourses of gender and sexuality factor first into European empires and later into the American empire and nation? How did ideas about and experiences of women’s work change? How did women of various stripes understand their lives as individuals and as members of families and communities? How did sexuality and desire in its many forms (economic, sexual, colonial, and political) shape everyday life and institutions in the American West?

Undergraduate Lecture/Discussion

This course examines the ways Americans understood and experienced sexuality, sexual identity, and reproduction, focusing especially on their role in the cultural and political life of the nation. Covering the seventeenth century to the present day, we will interrogate histories of marital and non-marital sex; laws regulating sexuality; racial regulations of sex; homosexuality and heterosexuality; birth control and abortion; and a host of social movements. This historical perspective will allow us to analyze social constructions of desire, reproduction, sexual identities, and sexual citizenship, while being attentive to varieties of sexual policing and state and non-state violence.

Undergraduate Lecture/Discussion

The last 130 years have been a time of incredible change for LBGTQ+ people and the meanings of sexuality in the United States. To make sense of all this change, this class will examine queer histories in America, from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. For the purposes of this class, “queerness” will include non-normative genders and sexualities, acts, and identities. We will look at a variety of historical subjects in order to address the following questions: How did queer communities develop and how were they policed and repressed? How have queer people defined themselves and how have social institutions defined them? How did LGBTQ+ movements emerge and how did they envision social change?

Undergraduate Lecture/Discussion

Oklahoma is at a regional crossroads, a part of the Midwest, South, and West. Thus, this state is at once unique and emblematic of national histories. This course looks to the complex interactions between the variety of peoples who have lived in Oklahoma, men and women, longtime residents and new migrants, and peoples of African, Indigenous, Latinx or Anglo descent. We ask how have governments, industries, and individuals shaped racial, class, and gender formations in Oklahoma. We also closely examine the processes by which the United States incorporated and integrated Indian Territory into its cultural and political systems.

Undergraduate Lecture/Discussion

This course’s central premise throughout is that American history looks very different from the vantage point of the West. We closely examine the processes by which the United States incorporated and integrated this region into its cultural and political systems. The course asks how did the federal government form western spaces, migrations, and the cultural and political lives of western habitants? And, finally, we explore the role of the region in the American imagination. Covering over 400 years of history, we will examine the processes and peoples that made the region distinct and the way some of those differences persisted throughout the 20th century while others faded.

Undergraduate Seminar

This course critically analyzes the history of sexuality in the United States. Focusing on the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the class examines histories of prostitution and dating; homosexuality and heterosexuality; rape; birth control and abortion; civil rights, feminist, and gay liberation movements; and the AIDS epidemic. We use our examination of the history of sexuality as a point of departure for studying the essential elements of the historian’s craft.

Undergraduate Seminar

This course explores the transformations of the American Right since the New Deal, with some attention to the Far Right in America. We start with the formation of the modern welfare state and early conservatives’ response to it. Much of our course will center on the post-1945 period when conservatives slowly took theirs from the margins of American politics to its center. This is also a senior capstone class. Thus students master skills involved in thinking as historians and produce original, independent scholarly work.

Graduate Seminar

This seminar focuses on the histories of women and gender in the context of US settler colonialism, from the 17th century to the 21st century. Through works set in the part of North America now known as the US West, we will seek to understand the various ways that westerners have articulated “gender”; expressed desires and fostered intimacies; built gendered communities or movements; navigated gender/race systems; and transformed their worlds, for better or worse. While this field first sought to restore women to western histories populated almost exclusively by men, it now covers a broad range of gender relations. Through recent scholarship, we will analyze the histories of men and women, and the many who inhabit the fluid borderlands of gender.