Mary C. Kelley

Mary Kelley is Ruth Bordin Collegiate Professor Emerita of History, American Culture and Women’s and Gender Studies. Professor Kelley is the former president of the American Studies Association and the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic. Her scholarship focuses upon issues of women and gender in 19th century America. In 2006 she published Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America's Republic, a book on the relationship between educational opportunity and women’s engagement with, and transformative impact upon, American public life. The paperback edition was issued in fall 2008. She is author of several major books and articles, including Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America, (Oxford University Press, 1984, reprinted University of North Carolina Press, 2002), the co-author of The Limits of Sisterhood: The Beecher Sisters on Women's Rights and Women's Sphere, (University of North Carolina Press, 1988) and the editor of The Power of Her Sympathy: The Autobiography and Journal of Catharine Maria Sedgwick as well as The Portable Margaret Fuller. 

Affiliation(s)

• Faculty: Department of History
• Faculty: Department of American Culture (AC)
• Faculty: Department of Women's and Gender Studies

Field(s) of Study

• American intellectual history, women's intellectual history, history of the book, American culture, American studies