Gendering World History

The Gendering World History series offers a groundbreaking approach to historical study by placing gender at the center of traditional fields that have often foregrounded men or impersonal forces. These volumes integrate the experiences of real individuals into a wide range of topics—from diaspora and law to revolution, food, and healing—demonstrating that gender is not simply additive but fundamental to understanding our shared past. The series examines how multiple, intersectional identities—race, gender, class, age—enable differential access to power and privilege across time and space, while challenging nation-state frameworks by exploring connections between the intimate and the global. It destabilizes Eurocentric historical trajectories and notions of linear progress, incorporating diverse sources beyond traditional texts, including material culture, oral histories, and archaeological evidence. Volumes across the series reveal how gender roles are constructed and performed across cultures, showing that while women have made political and economic gains throughout history, these advances have often been undercut by reinvigorated forms of social control. By centering gender in world history, these volumes interrogate how the personal is political, the local is global, and how interlocking systems of oppression work, and can be resisted.

Merging the distinct approaches, methodologies, and sources of gender studies and world history, these books are ideal for upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses across multiple disciplines.