April Haynes
Position title: Associate Professor of History
Email: april.haynes@wisc.edu
Phone: 608.263.1823
Address:
Office: 4119 Mosse Humanities
Mailbox: 4018 Mosse Humanities
Office Hours: TBA
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 traces the history of movements against sex trafficking to eighteenth-century abolitionists, who condemned sexual violence as a bulwark of slavery. It shows how anti-trafficking rhetoric changed over time: diverse women and girls invoked it while protesting exploitation in household service; employers, reformers, and state actors appropriated it to justify coercive practices as “protection.” Fears and realities of sex trafficking profoundly shaped labor markets, migrations, and movements between 1790 and 1860.
I am also working on a textbook project, which synthesizes major debates in gender 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
- “From Magdalen Asylum to Labor Depot: How the Panic of 1819 made Housework ‘Non-Market Activity’,” Journal of the Early Republic (in press 2020).
- “Intimate Economies” in A Companion to American Women’s History, eds. Nancy A. Hewitt and Anne Valk (in press 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.
Selected Awards
- Mellon New Directions Fellowship, 2020-2022
- James F. Broussard best first book prize, Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, 2016. View Interview
Advisor To
History Courses Taught
- History 283 – Women and Gender in World History
- History 353 – Women and Gender in the U.S. to 1870
- History 221 – Sex in America
- History 344 – Age of the American Revolution
- History 600 – Advanced Seminar in History: The Age of Jefferson and Jackson