Scholar - Women Also Know History

Participant Info

Website URL: https://www.luc.edu/history/people/facultydirectory/nickersonmichelle.shtml

Keywords: U.S. women and gender history, U.S. political history, twentieth-century U.S., U.S. urban history, American religion

About Me: Michelle Nickerson is an Associate Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago. She teaches courses on the history of women and gender, U.S. politics, social movements, cities and suburbs, and the Department’s Ramonat Seminar.

Nickerson developed an interest in the history of American social and political movements as an undergraduate at Rutgers University where her work at the Women’s Center immersed her in feminist activism and the history department introduced new worlds to her. After graduating from Yale with her Ph.D. and completing a fellowship at the Huntington Library, Nickerson taught for five years at University of Texas at Dallas before joining the faculty at Loyola in 2011. In 2012 she published Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right (Princeton University Press),which documents the grassroots activism of conservative women in Cold War Los Angeles and explores the impact of that activism on the emerging American right. This work led to her interest in regional and metropolitan political-economic development, which she examines in a volume of essays, co-edited with historian Darren Dochuk called Sunbelt Rising: The Politics of Place, Space, and Region (University of Pennsylvania Press). Nickerson is currently studying the Camden 28, a Catholic anti-war group of the Vietnam era apprehended, brought to trial, and acquitted after raiding a draft board office in 1971.

Recent Publications: “ ‘Because Women Just Know:’ Women, Gender, and Conservatism in Twentieth Century America,: in The Oxford Handbook of American Women’s and Gender History, (Oxford University Press), forthcoming, Sept. 2018

“Catholic Social Teaching in their Own Words: Oral Histories of College Students Learning CST,” co-authored with Harry Dammer at the University of Scranton, Journal of Catholic Higher Education (37:1), Winter 2018

Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey (April 2012)

Sunbelt Rising: The Politics of Space, Place and Region co-edited with Darren Dochuk University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, Penn. (March 2011)