Renée M. Sentilles
Associate Professor of History &
Director of Undergraduate Studies
American Studies Program faculty
Women's Studies Program faculty
renee.sentilles@case.edu
(work) 216/368-5413
I am interested in American history and culture:
high, low, nineteenth-century, current events,
the West, the South, gender and race, politics
and pop-it all holds my interest. Cultural expression
(principally published and unpublished writings,
popular music and theatre, visual arts and film)
informs my understanding and depiction of history.
As a scholar of gender and multicultural studies,
who has traveled and lived all over the United
States, I am particularly fascinated by regional
cultures and the relationship between cultures.
I enjoy examining how historical narratives are
created and told, and analyzing how and why certain
details are consistently left out.
At Case, I am director of American Studies and
also the person most responsible for offerings
in American women's history. In American Studies
I strive to bring together various disciplines
to approach the subject of American identity.
I focus attention on introducing students to the
many cultural institutions of University Circle
and the Cleveland area. In American women's history,
every other year I teach a two semester introductory
survey on the topic, and in the years in between
I offer a course called "Advanced Topics
in Women's History." Last year that topic
was Women and Medicine; possible future topics
include "women and popular culture"
and "women and war." Graduate students
are welcome to take women's history courses for
graduate credit.
As a member of the graduate program, I advise
several master's thesis and dissertations. In
the history graduate program, I principally teach
and advise in early American historiography, American
women's historiography, and American cultural
history. But I have enjoyed taking on topics somewhat
further afield, in subjects such as sports history,
American technology, and social policy.
My first book, Performing Menken: Adah Isaacs
Menken and the Birth of American Celebrity,
was a cultural biography of a Civil War era actress
and poet. Menken acted as a sort of 19th-century
Madonna, performing different personae off-stage
to gain and maintain attention as a celebrity.
Oddly enough, this sensation actress best known
in her own time for nudity, multiple marriages,
and friendships with the greatest writers of her
time (Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and Charles Dickens,
among them) is now more often studied as an African-American
poet, a Jewish poet, or a lesbian cross-dresser.
Thus, my work examines Menken, her period, and
celebrity in detail, but also raises questions
about they way contemporary scholars approach
historical subjects.
My current project, "American Tomboys, 1830-1920"
investigates the race, class, and gender dimensions
of the emergence of the American Tomboy in our
national culture. Arguably the most celebrated
and iconic American heroine of the late Victorian
period, my study of this rebellious cultural fabrication
sheds light on constructions of whiteness, changing
political roles for adult women, and connections
between conceptions of sexuality and childhood.
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