Jennifer Holland

Jennifer Holland is an Assistant Professor of U.S. history, specializing in histories of gender, sexuality, and race in the twentieth-century North American West. She is also a core affiliate member of the Women’s and Gender Studies department. Her book, "Tiny You: A Western History of the Anti-Abortion Movement," 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, "Tiny You" argues that activists made the political personal to many white Americans. By the 1980s and 1990s, they made the fetus central to how many a conservative, and many an American, thought of being a woman, a child, a Christian, and a member of a family. In her future work, she continues to attend to intimate and everyday histories in places shaped by American colonialism.

Her teaching and research interests include gender and women in the American West; LGBTQ history, sexuality, and reproduction; the Sunbelt; the U.S. after 1945; conservative and right-wing social movements; race and indigeneity; Indian Territory and Oklahoma.

She is the book review editor for the Journal of Women’s History and the director of the Summer Institute for Teachers of Oklahoma 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.