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Barbara Steinson

Professor of History

Barbara SteinsonBarbara Steinson, University Professor (2003-2007) and Professor of History, received her Ph.D. at the University of Michigan in 1977 and has been teaching U.S. history and U.S. women's history at DePauw since 1978. Her courses in women's history over the years include: “American Experience: Women and Families,” “U.S. Women's Legal History,” “Women and War,” “Women's Social and Political Movements,” “U.S. Women 1700-1900,” and ‘U.S. Women 1890-present.” She has chaired the Women's Studies committee and the History department. Her research interests, publications, and conference presentations include American Women’s Activism in World War I (1982), a second edition of which is under contract with the University of Illinois Press, and journal, anthology, and encyclopedia articles on women’s peace, preparedness, and suffrage activism.

Although she has maintained her interest in women’s activism during World War I, she is also engaged in research on rural women and rural life in Indiana. Her sabbatical awards include a Lilly Endowment Faculty Open Fellowship, which enabled her to spend a year at the Duke University School of Law; a CLIO Award from the Indiana Historical Society to fund her book project on rural life in Indiana, and the GLCA Scotland Fellowship, which helped support a semester as a visiting professor of U.S. History at the University of Aberdeen. Steinson has received several faculty development awards from DePauw University including Faculty Fellowships for her scholarship on rural women (2000-2003 and 2009-2012) and the Fisher Fellowship to revise her book on women’s activism (Fall 2003). She has been the co-chair of the Rural Women's Studies Association and President and Vice-President of the Indiana Association of Historians, serves on the Board of Editors of Peace and Change and the Indiana Magazine of History, and reads manuscripts for other periodicals and university presses.