BIO

Kimberly A. Hamlin researches, writes, and speaks about the history of women in America for scholarly and popular audiences.  She contributes to the “Made by History” series in the Washington Post and to the online magazine Origins: Current Events in Historical Context. Her research on women, gender, science, and politics has been featured in media outlets including NPR and CBC radio, and qz.com.  She regularly speaks to groups across the country, especially during women’s history month, and is a member of the Ohio Humanities Council’s Speakers Bureau. She is currently helping to organize national and local efforts to commemorate the upcoming centennial of women’s suffrage in 2020.

Hamlin grew up outside of Syracuse, New York, not far from the historical homes of many of the women she writes about today.  After completing her degree in American Studies at Georgetown University, she worked for U.S. Senator Susan Collins (Maine) for four years, first on her successful campaign for Senate and then in her D.C. office.  In 2000, Hamlin left Washington to pursue a PhD in American Studies at the University of Texas in Austin.  While in graduate school, she was the assistant director of the Austin Women’s Commemorative Project and taught classes on U.S. women’s history and feminist rhetoric.  Hamlin wrote her master’s thesis on the origins of the Girl Scouts in the U.S. and served as historical consultant on the PBS film “Troop 1500,” which chronicles an Austin-area Girl Scout troop whose mothers are incarcerated. 

In 2007, Hamlin completed her PhD and joined the faculty in American Studies and History at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. At Miami, she teaches classes on “Sex and Gender in American Culture,” “Science and Technology in American Culture,” “Medicine, Disease, and Culture,” as well as other introductory, upper-level, and graduate courses in American Studies and history.  At Miami University, she has received multiple teaching and research awards. Hamlin’s research has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Huntington Library, the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium, the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College, P.E.O. International, and Duke University, among other organizations and institutions.  Her article “’The Case of a Bearded Woman’: Hypertrichosis and the Construction of Gender in the Age of Darwin” (American Quarterly, December 2011) received the 2014 Margaret Rossiter Prize from the History of Science Society and the 2012 Emerging Scholar Award from the Nineteenth Century Studies Association.