April 25, 2016
I am proud to inform you that Assistant Professor of History Kathleen Casey has been awarded a Maurice L. Mednick Memorial Fellowship by the Virginia Foundation for Independent Colleges for her project, The Things She Carried: Women and the Power of the Purse.
While conducting research for her book, The Prettiest Girl on Stage is a Man: Race and Gender Benders in American Vaudville (University of Tennessee Press, 2015), Dr. Casey says she was struck by the critical role that costuming played in the development of each performer’s persona—in particular, one performer’s matching dress and purse made out of four thousand pennies.
The Things She Carried will be a book-length social and cultural biography of the purse. The Mednick Fellowship will support Dr. Casey’s research, which will include travel to the Henry Luce III Center for the Study of American Culture at the New-York Historical Society, the Fashion Institute of Technology Archives, and the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard University.
Dr. Casey joined the faculty at Virginia Wesleyan in the fall of 2012. Her areas of expertise include late 19th and early 20th-century American cultural and social history. Her research focuses on modern American popular and material culture, gender and sexuality, and African-American history.
Please join me in congratulating Professor Casey on this outstanding achievement. Virginia Wesleyan’s dedicated faculty excel as teacher-scholars, and Dr. Casey serves as an exemplary model of this.
