Assistant Professor of History
Email: Heather.Martel@nau.edu
Office phone:
(928) 523-6993
I am an assistant professor in US Gender history. My dissertation, ““Contact: Christianizing the Soul, Disembodying Science, Americanizing the Flesh, 1498-1627” focuses on the intersections of race, gender and sexuality in scientific, Christian and artistic representations of the first contact between Native Americans and Europeans. My research and teaching interests include the history of US women and gender, the history of sexuality, race and gender; queer theory; visual studies; de-colonizing, women of color, postmodernist feminist theory; critical race and postcolonial theory; early modern Atlantic world encounters between Africans, Native Americans and Europeans; and the colonization of North America. I am currently revising my dissertation for publication; and writing an article on women of color feminist theory and the narrative of US women and gender history, as well as an article on homoeroticism and power in the French Huguenot colony in Florida.
Courses Taught:
HIS 200: History and the Historian – Historicizing and Theorizing Thomas Harriot’s Brief and True Report on the New Found Land Virginia (1590)
HIS 295: US Women and Gender
HIS 300W: American Sexualities – Marriage
HIS 300W: Atlantic Slavery
HIS 300W: Travel Narratives
HIS 467 (Formerly HIS 390): Topics in Atlantic World History – Colonizing North America
HIS 484 (Formerly HIS 296): Topics in Gender and Sexuality History – Women in Cultural Contact
HIS 484: Topics in Gender and Sexuality History – American Sexualities: Telling LGBTQ Histories
HIS 499: Contemporary Developments - US Immigrants and Refugees
HIS 565: Readings in Gender, Race and Class – Gender, Sexuality and Power
HIS 590: Readings in US History – Historiography of Colonial America
List of Recent Publications:
“Hans Staden’s Captive Soul: Identity, Imperialism, and Rumors of Cannibalism in Sixteenth-Century Brazil,” Journal of World History (2006)
“Women and U.S. Public Policy,” Encyclopedia of Issues in U.S. Public Policy. Forthcoming.
Book Reviews:
Eve Keller, Generating Bodies and Gendered Selves: The Rhetoric of Reproduction in Early Modern England. Seattle, London: University of Washington Press, 2007. H-Net Reviews. Forthcoming