Women's History Faculty
Priscilla Murolo
Director, Graduate Program in Women's History/History
Courses: Thesis Seminar in Women's and Gender History, Revolutionary Women
BA, Sarah Lawrence College. MA, PhD, Yale University. Special interest in U.S. labor, women’s, and social history; author, The Common Ground of Womanhood: Class, Gender, and Working Girls’ Clubs; co-author, From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend: A Short, Illustrated History of Labor in the United States; contributor to various encyclopedias and anthologies and to educational projects sponsored by labor and community organizations; reviewer for Journal of American History, Journal of Urban History, International Labor and Working Class History, and other historical journals; contributor and editorial associate, Radical History Review; recipient of Hewlett-Mellon grants. SLC, 1988-
Tara Elise James
Associate Director, Women’s History Program
Courses: Thesis Seminar in Women's and Gender History
BA, Temple University. MA, Sarah Lawrence College. SLC, 2001-
La Shonda Barnett
Courses: Whose Body is it Anyway?: A Cultural History of the 20th Century
BA, University of Missouri. MA, Sarah Lawrence College. PhD (ABD), The College of William and Mary. Currently completing dissertation entitled “I Got Thunder (And it Rings!): Afrodiasporic ‘Voicing’ in the Music of Abbey Lincoln, Nina Simone, and Cassandra Wilson.” Research interest in African American expressive culture, jazz studies, women’s history, and museum studies; contributor to the Journal of Black Music and Jazz Education Journal; author of a collection of short fiction, Callaloo. SLC, 2003-
Persis Charles
BA, Bryn Mawr College. MA, Brown University. PhD, Tufts University. Special interest in modern social and women’s history, with particular emphasis on British and French history. SLC, 1977-
Eileen Ka-May Cheng
BA, Harvard University. MA, MPhil, PhD, Yale University. Special interest in early American history, with an emphasis on the American Revolution and the early American republic, European and American intellectual history, and historiography. Author of The Plain and Noble Garb of Truth: Nationalism and Impartiality in American Historical Writing, 1784-1860; author of articles and book reviews for History and Theory, Journal of American History, Reviews in American History, and Journal of the Early Republic. SLC, 1999-
Mary Dillard
BA, Stanford University. MA, PhD, University of California-Los Angeles. Special interests include history of West Africa, particularly Ghana and Nigeria; history of intelligence testing and external examinations in Africa; history of science in Africa; and gender and education. Recipient of a Spencer fellowship and Major Cultures fellowship at Columbia University’s Society of Fellows in the Humanities. SLC, 2001-
Shahnaz Rouse
Chair, Social Science
Courses: Contextualizing Communications: Structure and Representation
BA, Kinnaird College, Pakistan. MA, Punjab University, Pakistan. MS, PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Special student, American University of Beirut, Lebanon. Academic specialization in historical sociology, with emphasis on the mass media, gender, and political economy. Author of Shifting Body Politics: Gender/Nation/State, 2004; co-editor, Situating Globalization: Views from Egypt, 2000; contributor to books and journals on South Asia and the Middle East. Visiting faculty, University of Hawaii at Manoa and the American University in Cairo. Member, Editorial Advisory Board, Contributions to Indian Sociology, and past member, Editorial Committee, Middle East Research and Information Project. Past consultant to the Middle East and North Africa Program of the Social Science Research Council, as well as the Population Council West Asia and North Africa Office (Cairo). Recipient of grants from the Fulbright/Hays Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the American Institute of Pakistan Studies, and the Council on American Overseas Research Centers. SLC, 1987-
Lyde Cullen Sizer
Courses: Visions/Revisions: Issues in US Women's History
BA, Yale University. MA, PhD, Brown University. Special interests include the political work of literature, especially around questions of gender and race, U.S. cultural and intellectual history of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and the social and cultural history of the U.S. Civil War. Book The Political Work of Northern Women Writers and the American Civil War, 1850-1872, won the Avery O. Craven Award from the Organization of American Historians. The Civil War Era: An Anthology of Sources, edited with Jim Cullen, was published in 2005; book chapters are included in Love, Sex, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History; Divided Houses: Gender and the American Civil War; and A Search for Equity. SLC, 1994-
Komozi Woodard
Esther Raushenbush Chair
BA, Dickinson College. MA, PhD, University of Pennsylvania. Special interests in African American history, politics, and culture, emphasizing the black freedom movement, women in the Black Revolt, U.S. urban and ethnic history, public policy and persistent poverty, oral history, and the experience of anti-colonial movements. Author of A Nation Within a Nation: Amiri Baraka and Black Power Politics and reviews, chapters, and essays in journals, anthologies, and encyclopedia. Editor, The Black Power Movement, Part I: Amiri Baraka, from Black Arts to Black Radicalism; Freedom North; Groundwork; Want to Start a Revolution?: Women in the Black Freedom Struggle. Reviewer for American Council of Learned Societies; adviser to the Algebra Project and PBS documentaries Eyes on the Prize II and America’s War on Poverty; board of directors, Urban History Association. SLC, 1989-
Matilde Zimmermann
In Cuba fall semester
BA, Radcliffe College. MA, University of Wisconsin-Madison. PhD, University of Pittsburgh. Special interest in the Nicaraguan and Cuban revolutions, Che Guevara’s life and writings, labor and social movements, Atlantic history and the African diaspora in the Caribbean and Latin America, history of Latinos/as in the U.S., environmental history. Director study-abroad program in Havana, Cuba. Author, Sandinista: Carlos Fonseca and the Nicaraguan Revolution (Duke, 2000); Carlos Fonseca y la revolución nicaragüense (Managua, 2003); Bajo las banderas de Che y de Sandino (Havana, 2004); A Revolução Nicaragüense (São Paulo, 2005); Comandante Carlos: La vida de Carlos Fonseca Amador (Caracas, 2008). SLC, 2002-


