Dr Felicity Turner
Postdoctoral Fellow
Felicity Turner graduated from Duke University with her PhD in May 2010. Her research, which analyzes the handling of infanticide cases within local communities to consider larger questions about gender, race, and state formation in nineteenth-century America, has been supported by fellowships from the Newberry Library, the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, and an Albert J. Beveridge Grant from the American Historical Association.
During her tenure at the United States Studies Centre, Felicity will be revising and expanding her dissertation for publication. Narrating Infanticide: Constructing the Modern Gendered State in Nineteenth-Century America traces how modern ideas about gender and race became embedded in the institutions of law and government between the Revolution and the end of Reconstruction. Contemporary understandings of gender and race actually solidified only in the aftermath of the Civil War as communities embraced beliefs that women and African Americans constituted distinctive groups with shared, innate characteristics related solely to the fact that they were female or racially different. People then applied these ideas about gender and race to all arenas of life, including the law. Yet, in the post-Revolutionary United States, Americans had understood the legal status of women and African Americans in a very different way. Rather than marginalizing these groups within the courtroom, Americans in the early republic and antebellum periods encouraged and relied upon the involvement of females, the enslaved, and free blacks. Felicity’s project traces the larger changes that unfolded during Reconstruction, which not only extended the cultural reach of universalizing notions of race and gender, but also embedded them more firmly within law and government.
Felicity’s broader research and teaching interests include the “long” nineteenth-century, women’s and gender history, legal history, and the history of sexuality.
