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About Me

Ana Stevenson is an award-winning historian of feminism whose work brings transnational perspectives to the history of social movements across the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Dedicated to creating dialogues between gender history and imperial and settler-colonial histories, her research spans the United States, Australia, and South Africa. This research is particularly focused on the on the cultural and intellectual history of feminism, as well as media representations of political women, from suffrage to the present.

Her first book, The Woman as Slave in Nineteenth-Century American Social Movements (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), recently appeared with “Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements.”

Ana was awarded her Ph.D. from The University of Queensland in 2015. Currently, she is a Lecturer in the Pathways Program at the Nguma-bada Campus of James Cook University, Australia. Between 2016 and 2020, Ana pursued a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in the International Studies Group at the University of the Free State, South Africa, where she remains a Research Associate. Prior to this, she was a Visiting Scholar in the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh across 2014 and 2015.

In 2019, Ana was awarded the Turrentine Jackson (Article) Prize by the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association and the Covert Award in Mass Communication History by the History Division, Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. Her research has been supported by the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium, Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association, The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, International Federation for Research in Women’s History, and the Organisation of American Historians.

Ana is the Founder and Managing Editor of VIDA: Blog of the Australian Women’s History Network (est. 2016), with Alana Piper (University of Technology Sydney), and the convener of a digital humanities initiative, The Suffrage Postcard Project (est. 2015), with Kristin Allukian (University of South Florida).

Alongside Kate Law (University of Nottingham), Ana is the organiser of the Womandla! Online Seminar Series. Generously supported of the Third World Quarterly Global South Colloquium Fund, the Social History Society, and the Institute Français d’Afrique du Sud – Recherche / French Institute of South Africa – Research, Womandla! transformed from a conference into an online seminar series in the wake of COVID-19.

Her op-eds, articles, and blogs have appeared with the Washington Post: Made by History, Aeon, The Conversation, Queensland Historical Atlas, Australian Policy & History, JHIBlog: The blog of the Journal of the History of Ideas, Women’s History Network Blog, VIDA, Hope to Heal Magazine, and the British Association of American Studies’ award-winning blog, U.S. Studies Online.

Recent Publications

Book:

The Woman as Slave in Nineteenth-Century American Social Movements (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

Edited Collections and Special Editions:

With Alana Piper, eds. Gender Violence in Australia: Historical Perspectives (Monash University Publishing, 2019).

With Claire Cooke, eds. Special Edition: “Transnational Networks of Gender and Race in South Africa and the United States,” Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 19, no. 1 (2018): 1-116.

With Alana Piper, eds. Special Issue: “2011 Perspectives on Power Conference,” Crossroads 6, no. 2 (2013): 1-114.

Journal Articles:

“‘Tearing Off the Bonds’: Suffrage Visual Culture in Australia, New Zealand and the United States, 1890-1920,” Gender & History (in press).

With Kristin Allukian, “The Suffrage Postcard Project: Transatlantic Suffrage History and Feminist Digital Archiving,” Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies (in press March 2021).

“Imagining Women’s Suffrage: Frontier Landscapes and the Transnational Print Culture of Australia, New Zealand, and the United States,” Pacific Historical Review 87, no. 4 (2018): 638-666.

“‘Cast Off the Shackles of Yesterday’: Women’s Suffrage in Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins,” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 98, no. 2 (2018): 69-103.

“Harriet Clisby’s ‘Sketches of Australia’: Travel Writing and Colonial Refigurations in Boston’s Woman’s Journal,” Women’s History Review 27, no. 5 (2018): 837-857.

“The Gender-Apartheid Analogy in the Transnational Feminist Imaginary: Ms. Magazine and the Feminist Majority Foundation, 1972-2002,” Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies 19, no. 1 (2018): 93-116.

“In flag-rante: Julia Gillard and the infamous ‘flag scene’ in ABC’s At Home with Julia,” The Journal of Popular Television 6, no. 3 (2018): 381-403.

“The ‘Great Doctrine of Human Rights’: Articulation and Authentication in the Nineteenth-Century U.S. Antislavery and Women’s Rights Movements,” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 8, no. 3 (2017): 413-439.

“‘Bloomers’ and the British World: Dress Reform in Transatlantic and Antipodean Print Culture, 1851–1950,” Cultural & Social History 14, no. 5 (2017): 621-646.

“‘Symbols of Our Slavery’: Fashion and Dress Reform in the Rhetoric of Nineteenth-Century American Print Culture,” Lilith: A Feminist History Journal 20 (2014): 5-20.

“Making Gender Divisive: ‘Post-Feminism’, Sexism and Media Representations of Julia Gillard,” Burgmann Journal 2 (2013): 53-66.

Book Chapters:

“From Suffragist to Congresswoman: Celebrating Political Action, Women’s History, and Feminist Intellectuals in Ms. Magazine, 1972-1984,” in Suffrage at 100: Women in American Politics Since 1920, eds. Stacie Taranto and Leandra Zarnow (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020).

With Alana Piper, “Business as Usual: Feminist History in a Post-Truth World,” in History in a Post-Truth World? Theory and Praxis, eds. Marius Gudonis and Benjamin T. Jones (Routledge, 2020).

“Gillard of Thrones: Using Popular Culture to Resist Misogyny,” in Resist and Persist: Essays on Social Revolution in 21^st Century Narratives, eds. Amanda Firestone and Leisa A. Clark (McFarland & Company, 2020).

“From the ‘Radical Women’s Press’ to the Digital Age: Subversive Networks of Feminism in the United States,” in From Sit-Ins to #Revolutions: The Changing Nature of Protests, eds. Olivia Guntarick and Victoria Grieves-Williams (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020).

With Brigitte Lewis, “From Page to Meme: The Print and Digital Revolutions against Gender Violence,” in Gender Violence in Australia: Historical Perspectives, eds. Alana Piper and Ana Stevenson (Monash University Publishing, 2019).

“One Hundred Years of Campaign Imagery: From Woman Suffrage Postcards to Hillary Clinton Memes,” in Nasty Women and Bad Hombres: Gender and Race in the 2016 US Presidential Election, eds. Christine Kray, Hinda Mandell, and Tamar Carroll (University of Rochester Press, 2018).

With Jon Piccini, “Reading and Contesting Germaine Greer and Dennis Altman: The 1970s and Beyond,” in The Far Left in Australia since 1945, eds. Jon Piccini, Evan Smith, and Matthew Worley (Routledge, 2018).

“‘Sitting in Cages’: Imagining Victorian Women in Neo-Victorian Film Musicals,” in Victorianomania: Reimagining, Refashioning, and Rewriting Victorian Literature and Culture, eds. Simonetta Falchi, Greta Perletti, and Maria Isabel Romero Ruiz (FrancoAngeli, 2015).

Media Coverage

https://aeon.co/essays/was-the-suffragettes-description-of-women-as-slaves-justifiable

Social Media

@DrAnaStevenson

Country Focus

United States, Australia, South Africa, Britain, New Zealand

Expertise by Geography

Africa, Australia, British Isles, New Zealand, United States

Expertise by Chronology

19th century, 20th century, 21st century

Expertise by Topic

American Civil War, Colonialism, Emancipation, Gender, Human Rights, Literary History, Politics, Race, Sexual Violence, Slavery, Women