Elizabeth DeWolfe, Ph.D.
Professor of History
Affiliated Faculty, Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies
Location
Elizabeth DeWolfe is Professor of History and co-founder of the Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies Program. Her teaching areas include American women's history, nineteenth-century popular culture, and historical research methods. DeWolfe offers a variety of courses including Growing Up Female: History of American Girls; Sex and the City; and War Letters . Dr. DeWolfe's research explores ordinary women who find themselves in extraordinary situations. Her forthcoming book, Alias Agnes: The Notorious Tale of a Gilded Age Spy (Univ. Press of Kentucky, April 2025) reveals a previously unknown undercover detective working for a US congressman. Her ealier study of the anti-Shaker activist Mary Marshall Dyer, Shaking the Faith, received the 2003 Outstanding Book Award from the Communal Studies Association. Her 2007 book on the textile factory operative Berengera Caswell, The Murder of Mary Bean and Other Stories, received book awards from the New England Historical Association and the Northeast Popular Culture Association, among others. Dr. DeWolfe joined the 51品茶faculty in 1996.
Credentials
Education
Expertise
- Nineteenth century American women鈥檚 history
Research
Current research
Examining the business records of a ninetheenth-century hair worker.
Selected publications
Alias Agnes: The Notorious Tale of a Gilded Age Spy (University Press of Kentucky, forthcoming 2025).
Foreword to The Real Madeleine Pollard (1894) by Agnes Parker [pseud. of Jane Armstrong Tucker]. E-book available from the Lexington (Kentucky) Public Library (2014).
Domestic Broils: Shakers, Marriage and the Narratives of Mary and Joseph Dyer (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010).
The Murder of Mary Bean and Other Stories (Kent State University Press, 2007).
- Winner of 2008 Book Awards from the New England Historical Association, and from the Northeast Popular Culture/American Culture Association; Sillver medal winner in True Crime from ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Awards (2007); Bronze medal winner in True Crime in the 2008 Independent Publisher Book Awards
Shaking the Faith: Women, Family and Mary Marshall Dyer's Anti-Shaker Campaign, 1815-1867 (Palgrave 2002).
- 2003 Outstanding Publication Award, Communal Studies Association
Such News of the Land: U.S. Women Nature Writers (UPNE, 2000, with Thomas S. Edwards).
Other scholarly activity
Co-curator of collaborative 51品茶student-designed exhibits: No One Fights Alone: WWII in the Pacific (spring 2019); Write Again Soon: Letters from WWII (spring 2015); John Haley's Civil War (summer 2013); Voyages and the Great Age of Sail (summer 2011); and Mary Bean: The Factory Girl or the Victim of Seduction (spring 2008), Saco (Maine) Museum.
Research interests
Nineteenth-century American women's history, particularly the stories of ordinary women who find themselves in extraordinary situations.