Kirsten A. Smitherman

Ph. D. Student

Advisor: Catherine E. Kelly
Email: [[kasmitherman]]
Current Research: Cultural/Intellectual, Early America, History of the Body, Sex, & Gender

Bio

Kirsten Smitherman earned both her bachelor’s degree (’22) and her first master’s degree (’24) in history from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where she served as a graduate research and teaching assistant across a wide range of historical fields. Her M.A. at UNC Charlotte culminated in a thesis entitled “In This Enlightened Age: Marriage and Enlightenment in Revolutionary America,” directed by Dr. Christopher Cameron. In 2025, she was awarded a second M.A. in history from the College of William & Mary in Virginia after successfully defending her research portfolio, “Conduct Becoming of a Young Republic / Lavater’s and Novels.”

Kirsten’s research broadly examines Early American women, race, and gendered obligations, with particular attention to how understandings of women’s bodies—and the cultural meanings attached to them—shaped both personal and collective identities in the emerging Republic. She investigates the role that sex, expressions of sexuality, and eroticism played in women’s daily lives, as well as how these experiences were represented and regulated across the transatlantic world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her work emphasizes the interplay between print culture, popular literature, philosophical and political treatises, and evolving knowledge about women and the female body, arguing that these dynamics were central to the formation of personal, civic, and national identities during the Early Republic.