Fellowship / Fellows

Corinne T. Field

  • 2018–2019
  • Humanities
  • Mellon-Schlesinger Fellow
  • University of Virginia
Headshot of Corinne T Field
Photo Courtesy of Tony Rinaldo

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Corinne T. Field is an associate professor of women, gender, and sexuality at the University of Virginia. Her research explores the intersections of age, gender, and race in US history, focusing in particular on the political dimensions of adulthood in debates over women’s rights and racial justice. She seeks to understand how age functions as a vector of power that shapes citizenship, authority, and rights. Her current project explores the intertwined roots of race and age segregation in American feminism.

While at Radcliffe, she will draw on the collections of the Schlesinger Library to explore the history of generational conflict among woman suffragists. She will place suffragists’ understandings of age within a broader context—particularly the spread of evolutionary social science, the rise of Jim Crow, and debates over what the nation owed veterans of the Civil War—in order to explain how a faction of younger, white suffragists gained power by entrenching both age and racial segregation in their organizations.

Field, who earned her PhD in American history from Columbia University, is the author of The Struggle for Equal Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age, and the Fight for Citizenship in Antebellum America (University of North Carolina Press, 2014) and coeditor of Age in America: The Colonial Era to the Present (NYU Press, 2015). She is a cofounder of the History of Black Girlhood Network, an informal collaboration among scholars researching black girls’ pasts, and in 2017, she co-organized the Global History of Black Girlhood Conference at the University of Virginia.

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