Linda Reeder

Associate Professor
Ph.D., Rutgers University
area: Modern European women history
office: 208 Read Hall
phone: 573-882-5856
email: reederls@missouri.edu

B.A. University of Wisconsin-Madison, History and Italian, 1985
Ph.D. Rutgers, 1995

Linda Reeder specializes in Italian women's history. Her research interests focus on gender, sexuality, transnational migration, national belonging and most recently, female insanity. Her first book, Widows in White: Migration and the Transformation of Rural Italian Women, published in 2003 by the University of Toronto Press, examines the role of Sicilian women in the process of transnational migration. In this work, she explores the role women who remained at home played in shaping migration networks and the impact emigration had on women's private and public lives. She has expanded her interest in mobility to examine the ways migration altered the meaning and practice of gender and sexuality in Italy between 1880 and 1922. Her work on gender and migration has led her to focus on the gendered nature of citizenship and national belonging. Her current book project, Disordered Houses examines the relationship between gender, sexuality and national belonging through notions of female insanity in late nineteenth century Italy. She is an affiliate faculty member of the Women's and Gender Studies Program at MU.

Professor Reeder teaches courses on 19th and 20th century European women's history, the history of modern Italy and contemporary Europe.

Recent Work

Widows in White: Migration and the Transformation of Rural Italian Women, Sicily,1880-1920. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002.

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Professor Reeder

book jacket
Widows in White