Susan Johnson
Professor

Email: sljohnson5@wisc.edu
Phone: (608)263-1848
Office: 5117 Mosse Humanities
Mailbox: 5018 Mosse Humanities

Curriculum Vitae: View PDF

Office Hours: Thursdays 1:00 - 3:00 or by appointment

Education: PhD: Yale; MA: Arizona State University; BA: Carthage College

Bio Sketch:

I'm a historian of the North American West who specializes in the study of gender, race/ethnicity/indigeneity, and desire. I work primarily in the nineteenth century, but also reach back into the eighteenth century and forward into the twentieth century. My scholarship has focused on relations of power in western North America both as a place of lived experience and as an imagined space.  I work with graduate students interested in multiracial histories; gender histories; U.S. western, borderlands, Pacific, and other place-based histories; Latino, African American, American Indian, and Asian American histories; histories of sexual minorities and majorities; histories of whiteness; and social and cultural histories more broadly defined.  In addition to the work I do in the History Department, I’m also a faculty affiliate of the Chican@ and Latin@ Studies Program and the Gender and Women's Studies Department, reflecting my ongoing commitment to the intellectual projects of ethnic studies and gender studies and the political project of social justice.  I’m energized by academic work that that reaches beyond the boundaries of the university.  So, for example, I published my first book, Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush, with a trade publisher; I served as a consultant to the PBS American Experience documentary, The Gold Rush; and I participated in a special on-the-road summer course in 2005, “The Santa Fe Trail: In Search of the Multiracial West,” that took thirty-five undergraduate and graduate students on a two-week bus trip from Wisconsin to the Southwest and back again.

Research Interests:

North American West; Borderlands; 19th- and 20th-century U.S.; Histories of Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity; Histories of Desire

Selected Publications:

• Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000).
• The Lesbian Issue: Essays from SIGNS (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), co-edited with Estelle Freedman, Barbara Gelpi, and Kath Weston.
• “Writing Kit Carson in the Cold War: ‘The Family,’ ‘The West,’ and Their Chroniclers,” in On the Borders of Love and Power: Families and Kinship in the Intercultural American West, ed. David Wallace Adams and Crista DeLuzio (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
• “Nail This To Your Door: A Disputation on the Power, Efficacy, and Indulgent Delusion of Western Scholarship that Neglects the Challenge of Gender and Women’s History,” Pacific Historical Review 79, no. 4 (Fall 2010).
• “‘My own private life’: Toward a History of Desire in Gold Rush California,” in Rooted in Barbarous Soil: People, Culture, and Community in Gold Rush California, ed. Kevin Starr and Richard Orsi (Berkeley: University of California Press for the California Historical Society, 2000).
• “‘A memory sweet to soldiers’: The Significance of Gender in the History of the ‘American West,’” Western Historical Quarterly 24, no. 4 (1993).  Reprinted in A New Significance: Re-envisioning the History of the American West, ed. Clyde Milner (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), and in Women and Gender in the American West: Jensen-Miller Prize Essays from the Coalition for Western Women’s History, ed. Mary Ann Irwin and James Brooks (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004).

Awards:

• Bill and Rita Clements Research Fellowship for the Study of Southwestern America, William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University, Fall 2011.
• Lloyd Lewis Fellowship in American History, Newberry Library, Spring 2007
• Resident Fellowship, Institute for Research in the Humanities, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Fall 2006
• Feminist Scholars’ Fellowship, Women’s Studies Research Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Fall 2005
• Faculty Research Award, Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, Brigham Young University, 1999-2000, and 2004-05
• Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation Award, Graduate School, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2003-04, 2005-06
• Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, Huntington Library, 2001-02
• Frederick Beinecke Fellowship in Western Americana, Beinecke Library, Yale University, 2001
• Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy, for Roaring Camp, 2001
• W. Turrentine Jackson Prize, for Roaring Camp, 2001
• Joan Jensen-Darlis Miller Article Prize, for “‘A memory sweet to soldiers,’” 1994
• Don D. Walker Article Prize, for “‘A memory sweet to soldiers,’” 1994

Courses Taught:

Lecture Courses:

• History/CLS 461 - The American West to 1850 - Syllabus 2012 (pdf)
• History/CLS 462 - The American West Since 1850 - Syllabus 2013 (pdf)

Undergraduate Seminars:

• History 600 - Advanced Seminar in History - Topics: "Men and Masculinity in US History" - Syllabus 2013 (pdf); "American Southwest " - Syllabus 2005 (pdf); "Trail and Rail: How the Santa Fe Trail and the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad Created and Connected North American Peoples and Places - Syllabus 2009 (pdf)

Graduate Courses:

• History 900 - An Introduction to History for U.S. Historians - Syllabus 2007 (pdf)
• History 901 - Studies in American History - Topics: "Men and Masculinity in US History" - Syllabus 2012 (pdf)
• History 902 - Research Seminar: American History - Topics: "North American Regions, Lanscapes, and Peoples" - Syllabus 2010 (pdf)
• History 965 - Seminar in the History of the American West - Syllabus 2012 (pdf)

Special team-taught summer course:

• Chican@ & Latin@ Studies 330, The Santa Fe Trail: In Search of the Multiracial West - Syllabus 2005 (pdf)