Jennifer Holland is the L.R. Brammer, Jr. Presidential Professor of US History, specializing in histories of gender, race, sexuality, and the North American West. She is also a core affiliate member of the Women and Gender Studies department.
She is currently working on a book tentatively titled, Straightening Out: A History of Anti-Queer Politics in Rural America. It examines battles around queer rights and sexuality in the rural American West between the 1970s and the 2000s. In their strategies for victory, progressives often ignored the rural parts of their states, banking on the urban vote to secure gay rights. Meanwhile, conservatives organized in rural towns relentlessly, infusing anti-queer and anti-feminist politics into places as mundane as the local grocery store.
Her first book, Tiny You: A Western History of the Anti-Abortion Movement (UC Press, 2020), explains how social conservatives remade the subjectivities of many white religious people at the end of the twentieth century and how that cultural work, in turn, changed the partisan politics of much of the American West. Examining the anti-abortion movements in Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah, the book argues that activists made the political personal to many white Americans.
Tiny You received the W. Turrentine Jackson Prize for the best first book on the history of the American West from the Western History Association, the David J. Weber Prize for the best non-fiction book on southwestern America from the Western History Association, the Armitage-Jameson Prize for the best book in western women’s, gender, and sexuality history from the Coalition of Western Women’s History, and the Caroline Bancroft History Prize for the best book on Western American History from the Denver Public Library. Recently, she has spoken about Tiny You and abortion politics to journalists in television, radio, podcast, and print media venues, including PBS Newshour, CBS News, NPR, the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Guardian, and the Associated Press.
Her interests include gender and women in the American West; sexuality, reproduction, and queerness; the Sunbelt; the U.S. after 1945; conservative and right-wing social movements; race and indigeneity; Indian Territory and Oklahoma.
She is the director of the Summer Institute for Teachers of Oklahoma History and the former book review editor for the Journal of Women’s History. She received a PhD from the University of Wisconsin and a MA from Utah State University, where she served as an editorial fellow for the Western Historical Quarterly. She received her BA from the University of Michigan.
