Kirsten E. Wood Associate Professor History Department (305) 348-2803  woodk@fiu.edu Office Address: VH 207 Mailing Address: History Department  -- DM 397 Florida International University Miami, FL 33199

John Lewis Krimmel's "Village Tavern," 1813-14

My research and teaching interests include the social, economic, and political history of the early United States, with a particular emphasis on women, gender, and slavery. My first book, Masterful Women: Slaveholding Widows from the American Revolution through the Civil War (UNCP 2004), reinterprets the political construct of mastery in the southeastern United States in light of slaveholding widows' distinctive legal, economic, and social position as "masters" of slaveholding households.  In my current research, I am investigating the economic, social, political, and gender dimensions of tavern-keeping and tavern-going in the early republic and antebellum periods.  

I offer an early American history survey on a regular basis, and I teach upper-division courses in early U.S., women's, southern, and slavery history.  I have taught a variety of graduate courses, including a graduate research seminar exploring early American history from the perspective of the Atlantic world, American women's and gender history, and gender and slavery in the Americas.

Selected Publications

"Gender and Slavery," in Mark Smith and Robert Paquette, eds., Oxford Handbook of Slavery in the Americas (London: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

"Making a Home in Public: Domesticity, Authority, and Family in the Old South's Public Houses," in Craig Friend and Anya Jabour, eds., Southern Families (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, forthcoming).

"Women on the Move: Travel, Taverns, and Gender in Antebellum America," in Mark Cheathem, ed., Jacksonian America (ABC-CLIO, January 2008).

Masterful Women: Slaveholding Widows from the American Revolution through the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004)

"Old Miss Sho' Was Good to Us . . . 'Cause She Was Raisin' Us to Wuk For Her': Widowed Planters and Paternalism in the Old South," in Winfred B. Moore, Kyle S. Sinisi, and David H. White, eds., Warm Ashes: Issues in Southern History at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century, The Carolina Low Country and the Atlantic World (University of South Carolina, 2003).

"Broken Reeds and Competent Farmers: Slaveholding Widows in the Southeastern United States, 1790-1860," Journal of Women’s History, Summer 2001

"'The Strongest Ties that Bind Poor Mortals Together': Slaveholding Widows and the Construction of Family in the Southeast, 1790-1860," in Negotiating Boundaries of Southern Womanhood: Dealing With The Powers That Be (University of Missouri Press, 2000)

"'One Woman so Dangerous to Public Morals': Gender and Power in the Eaton Affair," Journal of the Early Republic, Summer 1997

Courses offered