ELLEN HARTIGAN-O'CONNOR

About
HISTORIAN
I study women, gender, and economic culture in the 18th and early 19th centuries. I'm interested in women as buyers, sellers, and the sold. My first book was on women's economic networks in the late 18th century highlighting the fact that consumption is not an individual act, but is embedded in all kinds of relationships, including to whom you owed allegiance. My new book on auctions and market culture looks at how auctions normalized economic practices that turned social relations into calculations. Nineteenth-century American capitalism began on courthouse steps, river banks and crowded auction houses.

PROFESSOR
I teach undergraduate and graduate courses in gender, colonialism, and capitalism in early America. My favorite classes are my "American Revolutions" seminar, and "Women and Gender in America to 1865." Students are often surprised when they learn that people in the past were just as passionate about issues from abortion, to religion and sexuality, to mother/daughter relationships as people are today. Few have ever heard of Thomas/Thomasine Hall, a transgender servant who crossed the Atlantic in the seventeenth century, and was met with both calm acceptance and violent overreaction. I study history because it is a discipline which leads us to develop real empathy for the different lives Americans have led, and I enjoy bringing my students to a more nuanced and inclusive understanding of how our Nation developed.

AUTHOR
I've published both specialized studies on economic life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and collaborative books and articles on women's and gender history in North America. I'm especially interested in centering women's lives while continuing to tell stories of imperialism and the birth of capitalism through trade, intermarriage, political activism, and consumer culture.

CONTACT
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Professor Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor
History Department
University of California, Davis
One Shields Avenue
Davis, CA 95616
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I am available for speaking engagements and appearances. Please contact me at: