Landon Storrs
Associate Professor
Return to Faculty listing»
- Phone: (713) 743-3085
- Email: lstorrs@uh.edu
- Office: 545 Agnes Arnold Hall
Dr. Storrs specializes in twentieth-century U.S. social and political history, particularly in the history of women, social movements, and public policy. She came to the University of Houston in 1995 after earning her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Teaching
Dr. Storrs's undergraduate course in U.S. Women's History since 1840 (History 3320) reflects her research interests in women’s paid and unpaid labor, reform movements, feminism, and changing constructions of femininity. In addition to looking at how women’s historical experience has differed from men's, the course emphasizes how women's experiences have varied depending on factors such as their class, race, ethnicity, and sexual identity. Another undergraduate class, U.S. History from 1929 to 1945 (History 4311), examines how the crises of the Great Depression and World War II shaped American society, politics, and state development. Dr. Storrs's section of the survey class, U.S. History since 1877 (History 1378), considers how ordinary people as well as powerful elites have shaped American politics, foreign relations, and culture. At the graduate level, she teaches seminars on U.S. women’s history, the U.S. welfare state, twentieth-century politics and reform, and The Professional Historian.
Research Interests
Professor Storrs's current research uses newly declassified government records to examine gender and loyalty investigations of U.S. policymakers in the 1940s and 1950s. Articles from this project have appeared in Feminist Studies, the Journal of Women’s History, and the Journal of American History (see below). With the aid of an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship (2006-07), she is drafting a book manuscript on the topic. Her first book, Civilizing Capitalism: The National Consumers' League, Women's Activism, and Labor Standards in the New Deal Era, analyzed female reformers' campaign for state and national wage-hour laws during the Great Depression, when industry migration toward low-cost labor in the U.S. South was driving down wages nationwide.
Selected Publications
- "Attacking the 'Washington Femmocracy': Antifeminism in the Cold War Campaign against 'Communists in Government,'" Feminist Studies (spring 2007)
- "Left-Feminism, the Consumer Movement, and Red Scare Politics in the United States," Women and Consumption special issue, Journal of Women’s History (fall 2006) (nominated for Berkshire Women’s History Conference best article prize)
- "Red Scare Politics and the Suppression of Popular Front Feminism: The Loyalty Investigation of Mary Dublin Keyserling," Journal of American History 90, no. 2 (Sept. 2003) (James Madison Prize, Society for History in the Federal Government)
- "Gender and Sectionalism in New Deal Politics: Southern White Women's Campaign for Labor Reform" in Thomas Appleton and Angela Boswell, eds., Searching for Their Places: Women in the South across Four Centuries (University of Missouri Press, 2003)
- Civilizing Capitalism: The National Consumers' League, Women's Activism, and Labor Standards in the New Deal Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2000). See http://uncpress.unc.edu/books/T-4814.html
- "Gender and the Development of the Regulatory State: The Controversy over Restricting Women's Night Work in the Depression-Era South," Journal of Policy History 10, no. 2 (1998)
- "An Independent Voice for Unorganized Workers: The Consumers' League Speaks to the Blue Eagle," Labor's Heritage 6, no. 3 (Winter 1995)