Lisa G. Materson is a historian of U.S. women’s and gender history. Her work is focused on women’s participation in social and political justice movements in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her book For the Freedom of Her Race: Black Women and Electoral Politics in Illinois, 1877-1932 (UNC Press, 2009) analyzes black women’s involvement in southern, midwestern, and national politics in order to undermine institutionalized racism. She is currently completing Within the Regime, Against the Regime: Ruth Reynolds and the Battle for Puerto Rico’s Independence. The book combines a feminist biography of Ruth Reynolds (1916-1989) with a microhistory of her multiple activist communities to examine the gendered and transnational history of the Puerto Rican independence movement. With her colleague Professor Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor, Professor Materson is also co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of American Women’s and Gender History (2018). Prior to arriving at UC Davis, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University and a lecturer in the history department at Yale University.
Lisa G. Materson
