Nancy Bercaw, who has been a member of the University’s history faculty since 1995, was recently named associate professor of history and Southern Studies. The appointment greatly enhances the Center’s faculty resources and enables Bercaw to pursue her teaching and research interests in interdisciplinary studies. After receiving a B.A. in history from Oberlin College, she earned M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in American Civilization from the University of Pennsylvania. Bercaw’s interdisciplinary graduate degrees and her interest in South history and Southern culture make her an ideal faculty member for the Center.

Bercaw’s research and teaching focus on race, gender, and alternative constructions of citizenship in the 19th-century South. She is the editor of Gender and the Southern Body Politic (University Press of Mississippi, 2000) and the author of Gendered Freedoms: Race, Rights, and the Politics of the Household in the Mississippi Delta, 1861-1875 (University of Florida Press, 2003). Gendered Freedoms crosses conventional lines between the history of gender and family life, the history of labor, and the history of law and politics. As the publisher’s description states, it is “the first book to analyze black and white Southerners’ subjective understandings of the household, challenging us to reexamine the relationship between identity and political consciousness.” Bercaw is currently working on a project tentatively titled “Disrupting Categories: A Cultural History of Black Womanhood.” In this new project she explores “how people understood black women once they were free” and specifically how the law tried to define black womanhood and how black womanhood affected labor and the ideas of what it meant to be a worker.

Bercaw is on sabbatical leave this fall. In the spring she will teach a new course on African American women, which will be a survey of history and theory, and she will be team-teaching Southern Studies 102.

Mary Ellen Maples

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