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About Me

I am currently an associate professor of History at Colgate University, affiliated with the programs in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Museum Studies. My forthcoming book, An Archive of Girlhood: The Convent Academy in Catholic America,  argues for the centrality of young women’s narratives in U.S. Catholic history and explores the print, visual, and material culture of the nineteenth-century Catholic convent academy. As I think through the categories of girlhood and youth, I am also beginning to write with my own family history to explore visual histories of Puerto Rican childhoods in mid-20th century New York City.

At Colgate, I teach courses on U.S. women’s and gender history, the history of sexuality, and local and public history.  I have served on the New York State History Advisory group, in the office of the New York State Historian, and on the Advisory Board of New York History, the Cornell University Press journal. Inspired by the 2020 push to mark the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment, I have been engaged in speaking and writing projects that assess the state of women’s history in New York-area museums, archives, and monuments, and the intersection of women’s and gender history with rapid response collecting initiatives.

I consult on digital history, collections building, and exhibitions projects, and have recently developed an undergraduate curatorial seminar based at a working museum, the Oneida Community Mansion House in Oneida, New York.

Prior to coming to Colgate, I taught at Bryn Mawr College, where, as Director of the Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education, I helped develop the collections portal “College Women: Documenting the History of Women in Higher Education” and mentored student researchers working on campus history projects.

I earned a B.A. from Barnard College and an A.M. and Ph.D. in U.S. History from the University of Chicago. In 2019-2020 I was appointed research associate in the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School. Further details can be found at my website, monicalmercado.com.

Recent Publications

“The Value of Women’s Things,” essay for Collecting Religion, eds. James S. Bielo and Matthew Hayes (2024).

“Picturing Catholic Girlhood: Religion, Portrait Photography, and Building Latina/o/x Collections,” Smithsonian Voices/Smithsonian Magazine (2022).

“‘Catholicism is Getting to Be the Style’: White Women and the Making of Catholic Culture at the Catholic Summer School of America, 1892-1914,” Religion & American Culture 32.2 (Summer 2022): 236-266. doi.org/10.1017/rac.2022.8

“Postcards from the Convent,” Material Religion 17.5 (December 2021): 652-661. doi.org/10.1080/17432200.2021.1982245

“Loretto Academy,” Empty Places series, American Religion (2020).

“Putting Women on a Pedestal: Monument Debates in the Era of the Suffrage Centennial,” for Suffrage at 100: Women and American Politics Since 1920, eds. Stacie Taranto and Leandra Zarnow (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020).

“Summer Camp: American Religion and Recreation in the Great Outdoors,” The Anxious Bench (July 25, 2019).

“Taking Stock of Gender History at AHA19,” AHA Perspectives Daily (January 3, 2019).

“The Politics of Women’s History: Collecting for the Centennial of Women’s Suffrage in New York State,” Collections: A Journal for Museums and Archives Professionals 14.3 (Summer 2018): 331-350.

“Religion, Race, and Sexuality,” in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Race in American History, eds. Kathryn Gin Lum and Paul Harvey (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 96-109.

“‘Have You Ever Read?’: Imagining Women, Bibles, and Religious Print in Nineteenth-Century America,” U.S. Catholic Historian 31.3 (Summer 2013): 1-21.

Media Coverage

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Country Focus

USA

Expertise by Geography

North America, United States

Expertise by Chronology

19th century, 20th century, 21st century

Expertise by Topic

Book History, Children & Youth, Gender, Higher Ed, Libraries & Archives, Material Culture, Museums, Pedagogy, Public History, Religion, Sexuality, Women