Katherine Hijar Social Science
Reactive Expressions: Deviance, Control & Erotic Desire in New York City, 1825-1875
Current Bio: Katherine received her Ph.D. in History from The Johns Hopkins University in 2009. After 11 years as a history professor at California State San Marcos, she is now a curator at the Mystic Seaport Museum in Connecticut. Her scholarly experitise is in U.S. social and cultural history, with emphasis on women, race, gender, urban history, and visual, print, and material culture.
Haas Scholars Project: Katherine will travel to New York this summer to conduct archival research on visual and textual representations of women in the mid-nineteenth century. By examining images of sexual women and women in New York City’s public spaces, she intends to extend our understanding of nineteenth century anxieties about urban crime, urban sexuality and ideals of moral conduct and bodily control. Utilizing a wide variety of archival sources, including illustrations of New York life found in engravings, ephemera and popular literature, as well as textual sources from the period, Katherine’s Senior Honors Thesis in History promises to contribute to the intersecting fields of urban history, cultural history and gender studies.
