April Haynes
Position title: Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion; Professor of History
Email: april.haynes@wisc.edu
Phone: 608.263.1823
Address:
Office: 4119 Mosse Humanities
Mailbox: 4018 Mosse Humanities
Office Hours: Thursday 10:00am-12:00pm
Biography
I am a historian of women, gender, and sexuality in the early US. My research priorities include racialized gender, intimate labor, and women in social movements. I teach courses about women in early US/North American history, gender in world history, historiography and historical methods. My first book, Riotous Flesh: Women, Physiology, and the Solitary Vice in Nineteenth-century America, unearths the surprising origins of a sex panic that ultimately prepared many Americans to accept heteronormativity. My current research project, Tender Traffic: Intimate Labor Movements, 1790-1860, traces the roots of today’s service economy and recovers household and sex workers’ labor activism in the early republic. I am also writing a textbook entitled Debating Gender: A History from the Ancient World to the Present Day.
Education
Ph.D., History, University of California, Santa Barbara: Doctoral Emphasis, Feminist Studies
M.A., History, University of California, Santa Barbara
B.A., History and Women’s Studies, San Francisco State University
Books
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April Haynes. Riotous Flesh: Women, Physiology, and the Solitary Vice in Nineteenth-Century America. University of Chicago Press, 2015.
Selected Publications
- “The Other Women’s Rights Movement: ‘Streetwalkers,’ Habeas Corpus, and Anticarceral Activism in New York City, 1830-1860,” Gender & History (Oct. 2024) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-0424.12810.
- “From Magdalen Asylum to Labor Depot: The Panic of 1819 and Gendered Economies of Labor,” Journal of the Early Republic 40:4 (Winter 2020) 709-715.
- “Intimate Economies, 1790-1860” in A Companion to American Women’s History, 2nd edition, eds. Nancy Hewitt and Anne Valk, (New York: Blackwell-Wiley, 2020).
- “Radical Hospitality and Political Intimacy in Grahamite Boardinghouses, 1830-1850,” Journal of the Early Republic 39:3 (Fall 2019).
- “‘Sex-Ins, College-Style’: Black Feminism and Sexual Politics in the Student YWCA, 1968-1980,” in Women’s Activism and ‘Second-Wave’ Feminism: Transnational Histories, ed. Barbara Molony and Jennifer Nelson (London: Bloomsbury, 2017) 37-62.
- “The Trials of Frederick Hollick: Obscenity, Sex Education, and Medical Democracy in the Antebellum United States,” Journal of the History of Sexuality, Volume 12: Number 4 (October 2003), pp. 543-574.
Advisor To
Selected Awards
- Mellon New Directions Fellowship
- James F. Broussard best first book prize, Society for Historians of the Early American Republic
- National Endowment for the Humanities-Massachusetts Historical Society Postdoctoral Fellowship
- Hench Postdoctoral Fellowship, American Antiquarian Society
History Courses Taught
- History 134 – Women and Gender in World History
- History 201 – Women and Gender in US History
- History 600 – Abolitionist Movements, 1619-present
- History 600 – Political Economy of the Early United States
- History 752 – Transnational Seminar in Gender and Women’s History
- History 936 – Gender in Colonial North America and the Early United States