Research Interests

20th Century U.S. history, U.S. South, women's history, history of higher education

Background

Margaret is a PhD candidate at work on her dissertation about white, Greek-letter sororities at southern universities during the twentieth century.  Her research examines how the role of sororities changed over time, from small, supportive networks for women students to highly structured, national organizations that promoted gender-specific social skills and enforced members’ heteronormativity.  Margaret focuses on sororities at universities in the American South as cultural producers of women who fit the mythical image of the white southern "lady.”  She demonstrates the ways in which this manufactured imagery helped reinforce the South's racial and gender hierarchies.  By examining policies of Greek-letter organizations at both the regional and national level, Margaret shows how the groups’ social training programs and rush processes functioned as control mechanisms that helped to fashion normative behavioral standards for middle and upper class white women over this period.  Her dissertation adviser is Professor Leisa Meyer.

Education

A.B History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2001

M.A. Public History, North Carolina State University, 2003

Courses Taught

Spring 2006 TA for AMST 470: Williamsburg Documentary Project

Spring 2007 TA for AMST 350: Americans 1950s - Culture and Society

Summer 2007 Instructor for AMST 470:  Debating Southern Identity in the 20th Century

Summer 2010 Instructor for AMST 470:  New Souths:  Race, People and Place Over Time

Grants and Fellowships

2007 Guion Griffis Johnson Visiting Scholar Grant, Southern Historical Collection, UNC-CH

2009 Dean’s Prize for Scholarship on Women, “Training for ‘Whole Womanhood’:  The White, Greek-Letter, Social Sorority as an Instrument of Higher Education at Coeducational Universities in the American South, 1920-1970,” The College of William and Mary

Presentations

Margaret has presented papers at the William and Mary Graduate Research Symposium, the North Carolina State University Graduate History Conference, the Women's and Gender History Symposium at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Southern Association of Women Historians' Southern Conference on Women's History, and the Annual Meeting of the Southern Historical Association.

Publications

"Automobiles and Sex," and "League of Women Voters" in James Ciment, ed., Jazz Age Encyclopedia.  Armonk, NY:  M.E. Sharpe Publisher, 2007.