DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

Biography

Hannah Reynolds is a doctoral candidate specializing in women's and gender history of the nineteenth century. Her dissertation project examines the legal role of women and families in federal land grant policy. In particular, she explores how Congressmen, local land offices, and settlers themselves imagined women beneficiaries of the the Homestead Act of 1862 as bulwarks against land speculation and predatory market forces. Her work has received generous support from the American Historical Association, The Huntington Library, the Coalition for Western Women's History, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Clements Library, the Western History Association, the American Society for Legal History, the National Archives Foundation, and the Mellon-funded U.S. Law and Race Initiative at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Prior to coming to Northwestern, Hannah worked for five years as a social studies teacher and speech and debate coach at a rural public high school in Oregon and remains committed to inclusive teaching and learning. She holds an M.A. in History from Portland State University, where she studied the lives of women who participated in homesteading on the North Oregon Coast and how their contributions reflect the intimate and gendered nature of U.S. settler colonialism. Hannah received her B.A. in History from Vassar College, during which time she traveled to Matagalpa, Nicaragua and conducted oral histories with women from a broad array of local organizations to explore the evolution of the women’s movement during and after the Sandinista period.