Jen Manion

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Hot Takes @ Public Seminar

Books

Liberty’s Prisoners: Carceral Culture in Early America, Winner of the 2016 Mary Kelly Prize by the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic

My approach to history is informed by queer, feminist, and critical race theories — while remaining anchored in the archives. My main teaching fields include:

Revolutionary America
U.S. Carceral Culture
History of Sexuality
Transgender Studies/Histories
Race, Gender, and Sexuality in U.S. History
LGBTQ History in Popular Culture

Teaching Tools for LGBTQ History

Service

• Amherst College Center for Humanistic Inquiry
• Amherst College Press, editorial board
• Five College Queer/Trans/Sexuality Studies
• Five College Reproductive Justice Certificate
• OAH Committee on LGBTQ Histories/Historians
• Omohundro Institute Council
• William and Mary Quarterly, editorial board
• Early American Studies, editorial board
• Public Seminar, senior editor

My research in American history centers on social and cultural histories of poor, marginalized, and otherwise ordinary people. My first book was a social history of the founding of the penitentiary in the United States that centered women and paid close attention to how race, class, gender, and sexuality shaped the process. Many concerns that define contemporary debates about mass incarceration were evident in the policies that governed punishment over two hundred years ago, including the criminalization of African Americans — especially women. My second book is a cultural history of “female husbands” in the eighteenth and nineteenth century UK and US.

My research has been generously supported by numerous grants and fellowships from the following: Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard ; Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale; New England Regional Fellowship Consortium; Amherst College Trustee Faculty Fellowship; National Endowment for the Humanities at American Antiquarian Society; Mellon Grant at Massachusetts Historical Society; Research Matters Grants at Connecticut College; Mellon Grant at Library Company of Philadelphia & Historical Society of PA; Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission; Rutgers University Graduate School; McNeil Center for Early American Studies at Penn

News

• Chicago Tribune, “He, she or they: How companies are starting to address calls for a gender-neutral workplace,” 2019
• Scientific American, “Why we should all use they/them pronouns,” 2019
• Christian Science Monitor, “Boy Scouts to admit transgender boys: Why the shift?” 2017
• Windy City Times, “DePaul forum looks at 19^th-century transgender labor,” 2015
• Boston Globe, “The quickly shifting language of the transgender community” 2014

Podcasts

• Interview, “What’s Left of Queer Theory Now?” Podcast of Alice Paul Center for Research on Gender, Sexuality & Women, University of Pennsylvania, 2018
• Interview, “Slavery and Its Legacies,” Podcast of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, 2017
• Interview, “Liberty’s Prisoners: Prisons & Prison Life in Early America,” Ben Franklin’s World: A Podcast About Early American History, 2016

Amherst College
Associate Professor of History
111 Chapin Hall
Amherst, MA 01002

email: jmanion at amherst dot edu
tweets: @activisthistory

Faculty profile

Headshot by Code Purple Photography

Background Photos by Jen Manion: National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington DC; Cape Cod National Seashore Salt Pond Visitors Center, Eastham MA; Hyde Park, London; American Antiquarian Society, Worcester MA; London Metropolitan Archives, London; Library of Congress, Washington DC; Paddington Station, London; Provincetown MA.