Kathy Peiss
Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History
Kathy Peiss is the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History at Penn. Her teaching interests include the history of American women, gender, and sexuality, consumer culture in historical perspective, and modern American cultural history. She has written extensively on the history of working women, leisure and popular culture, the beauty industry in the U.S. and abroad, and working-class and interracial sexuality. She is particularly interested in the ways that commerce and culture have shaped the everyday life and popular beliefs of Americans across time.
Peiss is the author of Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (1986); Passion and Power: Sexuality in History (co-edited with Christina Simmons, 1989); Men and Women: A History of Gender, Costume, and Power (co-authored with Barbara Clark Smith, 1989); Love Across the Color Line (co-edited with Helen Horowitz, 1996) and Major Problems in the History of American Sexuality (2001). Her book Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture (1998) was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award and named one of Amazon's 1999 top ten books in Women's Studies. Her articles have appeared in Daedalus, Business History Review, Enterprise and Society, Genders, American Literary History, and Social Problems. Peiss has received research fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, Smithsonian Institution, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University; she has been elected a Fellow of the Society of American Historians and has lectured at the University of Sydney as a Fulbright Senior Specialist. In addition to writing and teaching, she has served as a consultant to museums, archives, public history projects, and films. In recent years she has appeared in the documentaries "New York," "Miss America," and "Beauty in a Jar."
Her current research concerns the history of American librarians, books, intelligence-gathering, and cultural reconstruction in the World War II era, a project that originated in the discovery of the hidden life of a family member. She has two other projects in the works: a study of the zoot suit and the politics of style, and "Designs for Living," a cultural history of the mass middle class in the mid-twentieth century, its material culture, aesthetics, and sensibilities.
Courses Taught (As Schedule Allows)
For current course listings, consult the Course Directory.
- HIST 204 Culture and Crisis
- HIST 204 Politics of Cultural Heritage
- HIST 346 U.S. Women's History 1865 to Present
- HIST 347 Gender History and American Film
- HIST 349 History of Sexuality in the U.S.
- HIST 610 Consumer Culture in Historic Perspective
- HIST 610 19th- and 20th- Century American Cultural History
- HIST 610 Gender and Sexuality in Modern American History
- HIST 700 Introduction to the Graduate Study of History
