This semester at Colgate, I’ve revised my upper-level History course, HIST 304 | Sex and Sexualities in U.S. History. In a few weeks, I’ll be chairing an excellent panel of scholars on a research panel on Sex and Religion, sponsored by S-USIH, the Society of US Intellectual History. The panel will take place on Zoom March 1 at 7pm eastern [you can register in advance, here]. Continue reading “Sex and Sexualities in U.S. History (2021 update)”
Over at American Religion I wrote about my book; about driving to convents in rural Kentucky back when we could still travel; about a place I just can’t get out of my head. That place–the Loretto Community in Nerinx, KY–is just one of a handful of convent properties I’ve traveled to in the past year. Read more here:
To trace the stories of Catholic academy girls in nineteenth-century America—girls whose white skin and class privilege, I argue, made them symbols of both U.S. Catholic aspirations and anti-Catholic nightmares—I started making convent road trips. Even repurposed convent academies are often remarkably maintained, and I am drawn to their parlors, porches, hallways, and anterooms…
Loretto Academy (Nerinx, KY)
Join me and the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School on Thursday, February 20 for my public lecture, Girlhood and the Making of American Catholicism.
This year, I’m teaching one course at Harvard Divinity School while finishing my book manuscript, and it’s the course I’ve always wanted to teach: Women and Gender in American Catholicism. Check out the syllabus online and let me know what you would add — I had to cut so much good, new, work in this thriving subfield off of the official reading list, but I hope my students will make a dent with their writing projects!
It’s June 4th, 2019 — 100 years to the day that Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
I woke to find the #19that100 hashtag firing up on Twitter, with historians and GLAMs (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) highlighting the anniversary and histories of voting rights in the context of the suffrage movement. Of course, it took more than a year for the Amendment’s ratification, so look out for much more suffrage history to come in 2020. Continue reading “Museums and the Politics of Women’s History”
On Thursday, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) announced $28.6 million in grants for 233 humanities projects. One of those projects was mine: The Young Catholic: Girlhood and the Making of American Catholicism, 1836-1911. I’m tremendously grateful for a NEH summer stipend as I go on research leave in May to finish the book.
Read more about some of the grants awarded this cycle here.
I’m delighted to share that I’ll be spending the 2019-2020 academic year (my junior leave from Colgate University) in residence at Harvard Divinity School, where I’ll serve as research associate and Visiting Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies and North American Religions. [WSRP announcement]
I wrote a short piece for AHA Perspectives Daily on the state of gender history at the annual meeting, and it’s out today.
Continue reading “Taking Stock of Gender at AHA19”
Thanks to a Faculty Development Council Bicentennial Research Grant, I’ve been adding new content on women’s education and the history of coeducation to HIST 211: Women’s Rights in U.S. History (#colgatewmnhist). Colgate History’s social media team captured my students doing what they do best.
Upstate history, women in the city, rethinking public histories, beginning new research. (It’s good to be home.) Continue reading “A Fall Pause”
Monica L. Mercado, Ph.D. 