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Toby Ditz
The Johns Hopkins University Telephone: 410-516-8234 Office Hours: Monday 2-4pm I am primarily an historian of early America, with a special interest in cultural history and the history of women, and gender, and masculinity. I received my Ph.D. from Columbia University and am now a Professor of History and an associate of Johns Hopkins' interdisciplinary Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. My first book, Property and Kinship: Inheritance in Early Connecticut 1750-1820, is a social history of inheritance practices, household authority relations, and the commercialization of agriculture. I am currently writing a second book to be published by University of Chicago Press tentatively entitled, "Shipwrecked: Manly Identity and the Culture of Risk among Philadelphia Merchants, 1730-1815," which embodies my more recent interest in the culture of commerce and the history of masculinity in the eighteenth century. Related articles on letter-writing and gendered subjectivity, commercial correspondence as a medium of imperial communication, and the changing relations between private and public communications, include: "Shipwrecked," JAH, (1994) [Article available to Jstor subscribers]; "Formative Ventures," in Epistolary Selves, ed. Rebecca Earle (London, 1999); and "Secret Selves Credible Personas," in Possible Pasts: Becoming Colonial in Early America, ed. Robert Blair St. George (Ithaca, 2000). I have also published several critical appraisals of the new scholarship on men’s history/ the history of masculinity, including, "What's Love got to Do with It," Reviews in Am. Hist. 28 (2000) (available to project muse subscribers), and “The New Men’s History and the Peculiar Absence of Gendered Power” Gender & History (April 2004), 1-35 (available to project muse subscribers), which was co-winner of the Article Prize for 2005 awarded by the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians. I currently offer graduate field examinations and related seminars in two areas. The first is the history of women, gender, and sexuality (often in collaboration with other history department faculty). The second is the cultural history of the British mainland colonies in America and the early United States, with special emphasis on recent interpretive and methodological innovations as they have emerged in the literature on colonial encounters, print culture and communications, the culture of commerce and consumption, and the construction of imperial identities. I also run a research seminar for graduate students at all stages who want to share their work-in-progress with others in an informal setting. Graduate students working under my direction have recently completed, or are currently working on, doctoral dissertations on masculinity and sexuality in eighteenth-century New England; urban youth culture and sexuality in the late eighteenth century; print, oratory and the creation of a gendered American public in the early national period; eighteenth century advertising and consumer culture; and printers, print culture; and political mobilization in the revolutionary era. I also teach two undergraduate seminars on the history of family, women, and gender and a survey course on the early history of the United States to 1789.
100.112 Making America: Mastery & Freedom, 1607-1789-Syllabus 100.191 Family History in Europe and the U.S.-Syllabus 100.498 Colloquium on the History of Family, Women, & Gender in the U.S.-Syllabus Cultural History of Early America Graduate Field Bibliography 100.669-670 Cultural History of Early America Graduate-Syllabus 100.765-766 Problems in Women’s History-Syllabus |
Professor