Gender, Violence, and Urban Space

Gender, Violence, and Urban Space

GIS Map of Feminine Homicides Associated with Saloons and Prostitution, 1870-1899. Created by Rachel Boyle. Base map courtesy of University of Chicago Map Collection.

My scholarship focuses on the historical intersections between gender, violence, and urban space. By looking to the past, I grapple with enduring questions about who is identified as criminal and who is held culpable for crime while seeking to understand the roots of a modern state that provides unequal access to justice.

Selected Work

Curator, “Place of Protest: Chicago’s Legacy of Dissent, Declaration, and Disruption,” Chicago Collections Consortium, September 2018. 

Author, FOSTA/SESTA Echoes Progressive Era Anti-vice Campaigns—And That’s Not a Good Thing, Omnia Blog, April 2018.

Guest, “Violent Femmes.” Shelf Life, a Newberry Podcast, Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois, May 2017.

Author, “She Shot Him Dead: The Criminalization of Women and the Struggle over Social Order in Chicago, 1871-1919.” PhD Dissertation, Loyola University Chicago, 2017.

Author, “Types and Beauties: Evaluating and Exoticizing Women on the Midway Plaisance at the 1893 Columbian Exposition.” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society: Vol. 17, No. 2 (Spring 2015).

Curator, “Practical Work: Chicago Woman’s Club Reformers, Criminal Women, and Delinquent Children, 1876-1920,” Women and Leadership Archives, Loyola University Chicago, IL, July 2013.