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Kimberly A. Hamlin is Associate Professor of History and American Studies at Miami University in Oxford, OH.  With support from a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Public Scholar Award, she has just completed her second book — Free Thinker: Sex, Suffrage, and the Extraordinary Life of Helen Hamilton Gardener, forthcoming from W.W. Norton in March 2020.  In addition to the NEH Public Scholar Award, this project also received the 2017 Carrie Chapman Catt Prize for Research on Women and Politics.

Hamlin’s first book, From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women’s Rights in Gilded Age America (Chicago, 2014), analyzed how women used science to advance women’s rights in the 19th century.  Her research has received multiple awards and fellowships (including the History of Science Society’s Margaret Rossiter Prize for Excellence in Research on Women and Science) and is widely cited in academic and popular outlets.  Hamlin contributes to the Washington Post’s Made by History column, frequently appears on public radio, and regularly lectures about women’s history.

Recent Publications

“How Racism Almost Killed Women’s Right to Vote,” Washington Post, June 4, 2019

“The Forgotten Suffragists: How the Passage of the Nineteenth Amendment is Being   Remembered and How for Decades it was Not,” Humanities Magazine (the magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities), May 31, 2019.

“Galentines Day and the Political Power of Women’s Friendships,” Washington Post, February 13, 2019

 “What Happens When Women Talk to Congress about Sex,” Washington Post, Sept. 25, 2018

“On Beauty Pageants and Equality,” https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2018/06/07/the-miss-america-pageant-taught-us-to-ogle-womens-bodies-can-it-now-teach-us-to-value-their-ideas/?utm_term=.c491e0188e2f

“This President’s Day, Let’s Remember the Women Who Have Run,” Washington Post online, February 19, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2018/02/19/this-presidents-day-lets-remember-the-women-who-ran-for-the-office/?utm_term=.4c4df7b5001d

“Roy Moore and the Revolution to Come,” Washington Post online, November 19, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2017/11/19/roy-moore-and-the-revolution-to-come/?utm_term=.f1e7af2db741

Books and edited volumes:

Free Thinker: Sex, Suffrage, and the Extraordinary Life of Helen Hamilton Gardener (forthcoming W.W. Norton, March 2020)

From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women’s Rights in Gilded Age America (University of Chicago Press, 2014, paperback 2015).

Co-editor, Suffrage Centennial Special Issue, Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, forthcoming 2020.

Co-editor, Gender and American Thought Special Issue, Modern Intellectual History, forthcoming 2020.

Articles and invited chapters:

“Gender,” invited chapter, in A Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, eds. Christopher McKnight Nichols and Nancy C. Unger, Wiley Blackwell Companions to American History Series, 2017, p. 87-101 http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1118913965.html

“Sexual Selection and the Economics of Marriage: ‘Female Choice’ in the Writings of Edward Bellamy and Charlotte Perkins Gilman,” in America’s Darwin: Darwinian Theory and U.S. Culture, 1859-present, eds. Lydia Fisher and Tina Gianquitto, Univ. of Georgia Press, 2014.

“‘The Case of a Bearded Woman’: Hypertrichosis and the Construction of Gender in the Age of Darwin,” American Quarterly 63 (December 2011): 955-981.  The AQ is the journal of the American Studies Association. (Winner of the Nineteenth Century Studies Association’s Emerging Scholar Award for 2012; Winner of the History of Science Society Margaret Rossiter Prize, 2014).

“The Birds and the Bees: Darwin’s Evolutionary Approach to Human Sexuality,” in Darwin in Atlantic Cultures: Evolutionary Visions of Race, Gender and Sexuality, eds. Jeannette Eileen   Jones and Patrick Sharp, Research in Atlantic Studies Series, ed. William Boelhower, Stephen Fender, and William O’Reilly (New York: Routledge Press, 2010): 53-72.

“Bathing Suits and Backlash: The First Miss America Pageants, 1921-1927,” in “There She Is, Miss America”: The Politics of Sex, Gender, and Race in America’s Most Famous Pageant, eds.     Elwood Watson and Darcy Martin (New York: Palgrave/St. Martin’s, 2004): 27-52.

 

 

 

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Country Focus

United States

Expertise by Geography

United States

Expertise by Chronology

19th century, 20th century

Expertise by Topic

Gender, Medicine, Science, Sexuality, Women