About the Gender History Program at UCSB

UCSB's gender historians have published path-breaking and prize winning books that have reshaped the study of women, gender, and sexualities, among them Jane De Hart and Donald Mathews' Sex, Gender, and the Politics of ERA: a State and the Nation, Patricia Cline Cohen's The Murder of Helen Jewett: the Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York, Leila Rupp and Verta Taylor's Drag Queens at the 801 Cabaret, Carol Lansing's Power and Purity: Cathar Heresy in Medieval Italy, Sharon Farmer's Surviving Poverty in Medieval Paris: Gender, Ideology, and the Daily Lives of the Poor, Ann Plane's Colonial Intimacies: Indian Marriage in Early New England, Erika Rappaport's Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London's West End, Mary Hancock's Womenhood in the Making: Domestic Ritual and Public Culture in Urban South India, and Sabine Frühstück's Colonizing Sex: Sexology and Social Control in Modern Japan.

Current research focuses on gender and consumer culture (Lisa Jacobson's forthcoming book Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in the Early Twentieth Century), on men and masculinities (Stephan Miescher's Making Men in Ghana), on work in a racialized gendered state (Eileen Boris's Citizen at Work, Bodies on the Job: Rethinking Rights in Modern America), on gender, law, and policy (Jane De Hart's forthcoming book on the early life and career of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg), as well as on the intersections between gender, colonialism, and modernity in diverse settings like the Middle East (Nancy Gallagher on Muslim women's human rights), China (Joan Judge's China's "Women's Question" and the Uses of Literacy at the Turn of the Twentieth Century), and the former Soviet republics of Central Asia (Adrienne Edgar's Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan).

With 48 members, the Department of History is now the largest, and we believe the most distinguished, since its founding almost half a century ago. In just ten years the History Department has recruited more than 24 historians, both junior and senior, putting us at the cutting edge of scholarship in many fields. We admit just 20 graduate students each year, but offer multi-year fellowship packages to more than half. University of California Teaching Assistantships, among the most generous in the nation, are available to almost all graduate students after their first year.

For more information about the UC Santa Barbara History Department, see our web page at http://www.history.ucsb.edu. Applications and information about graduate school at UCSB are available at http://www.graddiv.ucsb.edu.