Associate Professor of History
Chair, Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies Program
Affiliate Faculty Member, Africana Studies Program
Virginia Wesleyan
Kathleen B. Casey is the author of The Prettiest Girl on Stage is a Man: Race and Gender Benders in American Vaudeville and is currently writing her second book, The Things She Carried: Women and the Power of the Purse, under contract with Oxford University Press. She has also published in Gender & History, Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, and the Journal of American Culture.
Dr. Casey earned her PhD in History with a graduate certificate in Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Rochester in 2010. She was born in Massachusetts, raised in upstate New York, and is now based in Portsmouth, Virginia.
Recent Media
“Teaching the Deep Roots of Abortion in America,” Ms. Magazine
Five months after the Supreme Court issued its ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson, I published an op-ed in Ms. Magazine about the history of abortion in America.
Publications
“Well-written and thoughtful, Casey’s fine book deserves attention.”
Leroy Ashby, Washington State University, Pacific Historical Review, May 2017
Current Research
Standing next to Margaret Thatcher’s grey power bag while doing (pre-pandemic) research at the Museum of Bags / Tassen Museum in Amsterdam, May 2019. Look out for this bag in recent episodes of The Crown.
More Media
What was fun?
by Rachel Sugar for Vox
October 26, 2020
In the seventh month of the pandemic, I spoke to Rachel Sugar of Vox about fun in the American past and present.
Living History
In June 2020, activists in Portsmouth, Virginia remade one of the many Confederate monuments in the state. Erected at the site of a whipping post at the corner of High and Court Streets, this monument was completed in 1881. It has since been removed. Photo by Casey.
About
Kathleen B. Casey, Ph.D 