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About Me

I am a Professor of History at Duke University, with secondary appointments in International & Comparative Studies and in Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. My first book, Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico (Duke University Press, 2005), explores questions of gender and citizenship in the 1930s. Her second book, International Women’s Year: The Greatest Consciousness-Raising Event in History considers the history and legacies of the United Nation’s first world conference on women in 1975 in Mexico City (Oxford University Press, 2017). She is currently writing a biography of the Mexican activist and folksinger Concha Michel, a one-time Communist who became an icon of maternalist feminism and a vocal advocate for recognizing the economic importance of subsistence labors.  She is also organizing an international, interdisciplinary collaboration centered on rethinking the care economy.

Recent Publications

Books

International Women’s Year:  The Greatest Consciousness-Raising Event in History (New York:  Oxford University Press, 2017).

Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico (Durham:  Duke University Press, 2005).

Edited volume

Sex in Revolution: Gender, Politics, and Power in Modern Mexico.  Jocelyn Olcott, Mary Kay Vaughan, and Gabriela Cano, eds.  (Duke University Press, 2006).

Articles

“Public in a Domestic Sense:  Sex Work, Nation-Building, and Class Identification in Modern Europe,” Comment for AHR Forum, American Historical Review 123, no. 1 (Feb. 2018):  124-31.

“‘A Plague of Salaried Marxists’:  Sexuality and Subsistence in the Revolutionary Imaginary of Concha Michel,” Journal of Contemporary History 52, no. 4 (2017):  980-98.

“Transnational Feminism:  Event, Temporality, and Performance at the 1975 International Women’s Year Conference.”  In Cultures in Motion, edited by Daniel T Rodgers, Bhavani Raman and Helmut Reimitz. Princeton: Princeton University Press (2013), 241-66.

“A Happier Marriage?:  Feminist History Takes the Transnational Turn.”  In Making Women’s Histories: Beyond National Perspectives, Pamela Nadell and Katherine Haulman, eds.  New York:  New York University Press (2013), 237-258.

“Empires of Information:  Media Strategies for 1975 International Women’s Year.” Journal of Women’s History 24, no. 4 (2012), 24-48.

“Introduction:  Research and Rethinking the Labors of Love.” For a special issue I edited for Hispanic American Historical Review 91:1 (February 2011), 1-27.

“The Battle within the Home:  Development Strategies and the Commodification of Caring Labors at the 1975 International Women’s Year Conference.” In Workers Across the Americas:  The Transnational Turn in Labor History, Leon Fink, ed.  New York:  Oxford University Press (2011), 194-214.

“Mueras y matanza:  Spectacles of Terror and Violence in Postrevolutionary Mexico.”  In A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence during Latin America’s Long Cold War, Greg Grandin and Gilbert M. Joseph, eds.  Durham:  Duke University Press (2010), 62-87.

“Cold War Conflicts and Cheap Cabaret:  Performing Politics at the 1975 United Nations International Women’s Year Conference in Mexico City.” Gender and History 22:3 (November 2010), 733-754.

“The Politics of Opportunity:  Mexican Populism under Lázaro Cárdenas and Luis Echeverría.”  In Gender and Populism in Latin America:  Passionate Politics.  Karen Kampwirth, ed.  University Park:  Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010.

“Globalizing Sisterhood:  International Women’s Year and the Limits of Identity Politics.”  In Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective, in Niall Ferguson, Charles Maier, Erez Manela, and Daniel Sargent, eds.  Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, 2010.

“‘Take Off That Streetwalker’s Dress’:  Concha Michel and the Cultural Politics of Gender in Postrevolutionary Mexico.” Journal of Women’s History 21:3 (Fall 2009), 36-59.

Media Coverage

Social Media

@jocelyn_olcott

Country Focus

Mexico

Expertise by Geography

Latin America

Expertise by Chronology

20th century

Expertise by Topic

Diplomacy, Gender, Human Rights, Politics, Rebellion & Revolution, Women