Research Interests

Kirsten Swinth was recently named Magis Distinguished Professor of History. She is the author of Painting Professionals: Women Artists and the Development of Modern American Art, 1870-1930 (North Carolina, 2001). She is currently working on a cultural history of the “working mother” in the United States since 1965. Projects on the settlement movement, arts programs, and Progressive Era social thought are in process. An edited collection of documents from the arts programs at Greenwich House, a settlement house in New York City, will appear on the online database Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 (Alexander Street Press, 2006). Dr. Swinth has also published in American Quarterly, Reviews in American History, American Studies International, and The Public Historian. She is the past winner of a John Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship in Art and the Humanities and a Fulbright Fellowship to Mozambi.

In the spring of 2006, Dr. Swinth will be an invited lecturer at the National Gallery in London as part of a conference in conjunction with the exhibit, “Americans in Paris, 1860-1900.” She will also deliver a paper at the British Association for American Studies at the University of Kent.

Dr. Swinth currently directs the American Studies program at Fordham and teaches courses in American cultural theory and history. In the history department her courses include U.S. cultural history, women’s and gender history, popular culture, and history of the American west. New course offerings will be in the history of motherhood as well as post-1945 gender and cultural history. Dr. Swinth also offers courses in the American and Gender History graduate programs.