Marjorie Levine-Clark
http://carbon.cudenver.edu/~mlevine
Teaching
My teaching areas are modern Britain; gender, women, and sexuality in modern Europe; and medicine and health. My courses explore various historical methodologies and practices, and I am particularly interested in getting students to think about the ways that historical narratives -- or the stories we tell about the past -- are constructed. I teach interactively, meaning students don't learn predominantly from lectures in my classes, but rather from discussions about and engagement with reading materials. I like to utilize the new technologies that are available in our classrooms and emphasize the use of images as important tools to understanding the ways people represent their ideas.
Interests
My research focuses on relationships between gender, class, health, and welfare in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England. My book Beyond the Reproductive Body (Ohio State University Press, 2004) explores competing models of the female body in the 1830s and 1840s, and the impact these competing models had on public policies and the ways poor women thought about their health and work. My current project examines the impact of men's unemployment and/or absence on family survival strategies from about 1870 to 1930 in England's Black Country. This study involves research into the ways assumptions about gender influenced welfare and employment policies and practices. Most of my research takes place in county record offices in England, and I try to get to the UK at least once a year.
When not at work, I sing, cook, eat, walk, and play with my lovely daughter Isabel.
Publications
"The Gendered Economy of Family Liability: Intergenerational Relationships and Poor Law Relief in England's Black Country, 1871-1911," Journal of British Studies, Winter 2006.
Beyond the Reproductive Body: The Politics of Women's Health and Work in Early Victorian England. Ohio State University Press (series on Women and Health), 2004.
"'Embarrassed Circumstances': Gender, Poverty, and Insanity in the West Riding of England in the Mid Victorian Years," in Sex and Seclusion. Class and Custody. Perspectives on Gender and Class in the History of British and Irish Psychiatry, eds. Jonathan Andrews and Anne Digby (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004).
"Testing the Reproductive Hypothesis; or what made working-class women sick in early Victorian London," Women's History Review, June 2002.
"Engendering Relief: Women, Ablebodiedness, and the Poor Law in Early Victorian England," Journal of Women's History, Winter 2000.
"Dysfunctional Domesticity: Female Insanity and Family Relationships among the West Riding Poor in the Mid Nineteenth Century," Journal of Family History, July 2000.
