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About Me

I am currently assistant professor of History at Colgate University, affiliated with Women’s Studies and Museum Studies. My research takes on questions of women, girlhood, and religion in nineteenth and twentieth century North America (with a particular focus on American Catholicism), and the role of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies in developing campus histories and public history sites and curricula. I am at work finishing my first book, The Young Catholic: Girlhood and the Making of American Catholicism, which argues for the centrality of young women’s narratives in nineteenth-century U.S. Catholic history. Additional projects in progress include an assessment of campus history projects as care work, a history of women’s presence at the Catholic Summer School of America, and work on the material culture of women’s religious institutions.

At Colgate, I teach courses on U.S. women’s and gender history, the history of sexuality, and local and public history.  I also serve 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. As Americans marked the centennial of the 19th Amendment during 2020 (and beyond), I am engaged in speaking and writing projects that assess women’s history in museums, archives, and public monument 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. From 2014-2016 I directed the Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education at Bryn Mawr College. In 2019-2020 I was appointed research associate in the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School. Further details, including a recent CV, can be found at my website, monicalmercado.com.

Recent Publications

“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.

“Mapping the Women of Evangelical Gotham,” review of Kyle B. Roberts, Evangelical Gotham: Religion and the Making of New York City, 1783-1860 (University of Chicago Press, 2016) for Religion in American History (March 29, 2017).

“History of Women’s Education Open Access Project,” National Endowment for the Humanities white paper, co-authored with Eric Pumroy, Rachel Appel, and Evan McGonagill (August 2015).

“‘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

Social Media

monicalmercado

Country Focus

USA

Expertise by Geography

North America, United States

Expertise by Chronology

19th century, 20th century

Expertise by Topic

Book History, Children & Youth, Gender, Higher Ed, Museums, Public History, Religion, Sexuality, Women