Participant Info

First Name
Joanna
Last Name
Scutts
Affiliation
Independent
Website URL
www.joannascutts.com
Keywords
Women's history, New York City, 20th Century, cultural history, feminism, literature
Additional Contact Information

Personal Info

Photo
About Me

I am a cultural critic and independent scholar based in New York City. My book, “The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like It” was published by Liveright, an imprint of W.W. Norton, in November 2017. It explores the life and legacy of a Vogue editor turned guru for female independence, and the larger cultural status of single women, from the 1930s through the early 1960s.

From 2016 to 2018 I was the inaugural Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Women’s History at the New-York Historical Society, where I worked with a small team to oversee the opening of a new Center for Women’s History in April 2017. I helped research, curate, and coordinate the permanent interactive digital installation, “Women’s Voices,” and co-curated a temporary gallery exhibition, “Hotbed” (November 2017–March 2018) on radical politics and women’s rights in Greenwich Village in the 1910s.

I hold a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University (2010), where my research focused on the cultural memory of World War I.

Recent Publications

Book: The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like It. (Liveright/W.W. Norton, 2017.)

Contributor to The Washington Post, The New Republic, Newsday, Slate, Vulture, Curbed, Wall Street Journal, Guardian US, New Yorker online, and more. Portfolio.

Media Coverage
Country Focus
Expertise by Geography
United Kingdom, United States
Expertise by Chronology
20th century
Expertise by Topic
Gender, Material Culture, Museums, Public History, Women, World War I