Mary Lou Roberts
Professor

eMail: maryroberts@wisc.edu
Phone: (608)263-1973
Office: 5101 Mosse Humanities
Mailbox: 5003 Mosse Humanities

Office Hours: TBA

Education: PhD: Brown University; MA: Sarah Lawrence College; BA: Wesleyan University

Bio Sketch:

My specialization is Women and Gender; France.

My Research and Teaching Interests: Late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Europe, particularly in France. Women and gender, particularly the problem of gender and change, i.e. how the French used gender issues to conceive of change, and how late nineteenth-century "new women" broke with naturalized definitions of domestic femininity. New projects: My New Project concerns  the politics of sex during the US occupation of France.  It explores how intimate relations helped both to secure and to challenge American imperial ambitions during the years 1944 to 1946.  As the GIs conquered Normandy in the summer of 1944, they pursued their fantasies of having sex with French women.  Such erotic contacts—including heterosexual sex, prostitution, and rape—soon became the focus of conflict and debate between the US military and French officials.   As these debates occurred in newspapers and official correspondence, they anchored larger struggles for authority,  including the breadth of US political power in Europe, and its moral role as a new global leader.  Sex became a vital transfer point for the exercise of—and resistance to—an American bid for dominance on the European continent.

Selected Publications:

• Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin de Siecle France, University of Chicago Press, 2002.
• Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Post-war France, 1918-1928, Women in Culture and Society Series, edited by Catherine Stimpson, Univesity of Chicago Press, January 1994.
  

Awards:

• Vilas Associateship Fellowship, University of Wisconsin, 2005-2007
• Humanities Institute Fellowship, University of Wisconsin,  Spring 2005
• Karen F. Johnson Outstanding Teacher Award, History Department, University of Wisconsin,  December 2005

Courses Taught:

Lecture Courses:

• History 120 - Europe & Modern World 1815-present
• History 392 - Women in History

Undergraduate Seminars:

• History 200 - Historical Studies - Topics: "Twentieth Century as Lived Experience"
• History 600 - Advanced Seminar in History - Topics: "Women, Gender, & War in 20th Century"

Graduate Courses:

• History 891 - Pro-seminar in Modern European History - Topics: "Rise & Fall of the Domestic Ideal"; "Gender & Race in European History"