Hillyer Hall 126
860.768.4332 EducationPh.D. - George Washington University |
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Dr. Laurel Clark-Shire is currently revising a book manuscript drawn from her research on U.S. expansion into Florida. Taming the Territory: Women on the Florida Frontier uses Florida to explore the ways in which American leaders and settlers negotiated Americanizing new territories. It argues that women - and ideas about women - were central to how the US justified and managed its expansion into Florida and the territories that followed it into the United States. Dr. Clark has a long-standing love of social and cultural history, and enjoys teaching and researching all aspects of the American past that touch on the ways that people, especially women, shaped it. Her work engages with the intersections of gender, race, class, and sexuality in the United States. Her undergraduate thesis was an oral history study of feminist lesbians in Baltimore in the 1970s and 1980s, and was published as “Beyond the Gay/Straight Split: the Socialist Feminist Community of Baltimore” in Feminist Formations (formerly the NWSA Journal) in 2007. Dr. Clark is also involved in public history projects. Currently, she is a historical consultant on a museum exhibit about Mary Pickersgill (the woman credited with creating the Star-Spangled Banner) and her family, who lived in Philadelphia and Baltimore in the late 1700s and early 1800s. “Family of Flagmakers” will open at the Star-Spangled Banner Flaghouse in Baltimore in 2012. Her next major research project will be a study of women and work in early Baltimore, and will follow the lives of all the women who lived in Pickersgill’s household between 1807 and 1857, including her daughter and nieces, white female apprentices, free black women, and slaves. Dr. Clark was the recipient of a Cardin Award for Faculty research in 2009, a Women’s Education and Leadership Fund (A Legacy of the Hartford College for Women) grant in 2010, and a 2010 Award for Excellence in Teaching at the University of Hartford. She attends conferences and meetings of the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, the American Studies Association, and the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians. |
