My Current Interests

Karen J. Taylor
Department of History

My current interests are theories about identity, sexuality, popular culture, and semiotics or discourse. I see those three things as fundamentals of human interaction and thus extremely important in our understanding of U.S. (or any other) history. We construct our identities from the discourses around us in what I think of as social nexuses. A social nexus is an arena where we define who we are and what our experiences mean. It is made up of all the voices (vocalities) which participate in the definition of meaning, from our families, to our friends, to our colleagues at work or school, to our perception of ourselves as members of communities and nations. In those social nexuses the most powerful voices we listen to as we construct our identities are our parents and siblings, our friends, and the media as it is represented in popular culture. Because our identities determine who we want to perform ourselves as, and therefore how we act, they are central to how we both read and tell our histories. Those interests have shaped my current research.

Works in progress

Articles

"Reconstructing Men in Savannah Gerogia, 1865-1876"

An examination of Reconstruction in Savannah, Georgia, from 1865 to 1876, from the perspective of the goals, behavior, and experiences of four men who occupied very different race and class hierarchies: Richard D. Arnold, Tunis G. Campbell, Henry M. Turner, and John E. Bryant.

"Nightmare on Mainstreet: Gender, Race, and Crisis."

An analysis of representations of masculinity in crisis in horror films, focusing primarily on Wes Craven's Scream trilogy.

"History and Social Theory."

Considers the impact of Marxist, Feminist, Post-Colonial, Identity, and Queer Theory on the study of history, and develops the idea of "Liminal Social Theory."

Books

Catalyst: A Gendered History of the United States.

A textbook synthesizing the current work on men's and women's histories, which suggests that gender has been a catalyst for the evolution of democracy in the U.S.

Colonialism and Sexuality: A Reader (co-edited by Charles Peterson)

A collection of articles and essays which examine the ways in which sexuality created porous race, class, and gender boundaries between colonizers and colonized.

Manifest Destinies: A Tale of Men in Three Cities.

A detailed study of the ways patriarchy structured men's lives in Boston, Denver, and Savannah from the 1840s through WWI.