Faculty in the Department of History
Anya Jabour
Regents Professor of History
Office: LA 254Email: anya.jabour@umontana.edu
Office Hours:
Tuesdays, 1-2pm and by appointment. All office-hour meetings will be conducted via Zoom (use this link to enter the "waiting room").
Personal WebsiteCurriculum Vitae
Personal Summary
Anya Jabour is a professor in the History Department and a past co-director of the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at the University of Montana. She teaches courses in U.S. women’s history, family history, and southern history as well as several upper-division writing courses. Professor Jabour was the 2001 recipient of the Helen and Winston Cox Award for Excellence in Teaching and the 2014 recipient of the Paul Lauren Undergraduate Research Faculty Mentor Award.
She has authored four books, Marriage in the Early Republic, Scarlett’s Sisters, Topsy-Turvy, and Sophonisba Breckinridge, and has edited a collection on Major Problems in the History of American Families and Children and another on Family Values in the Old South, and has published numerous articles and essays. She also served as a historical consultant for the PBS Civil War miniseries, Mercy Street.
In 2013, Professor Jabour was named the University of Montana's Distinguished Scholar. In 2014 she received the George M. Dennison Presidential Faculty Award for Distinguished Accomplishment. In 2016 she was appointed Regents Professor, the highest honor in the Montana University System.
Professor Jabour recently published a biography of educator and reformer Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge (1866-1948), for which she received a summer stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Professor Jabour advises graduate students in all periods of U.S. history whose interests intersect with her specialties in gender, sexuality, race, and reform. Her current and former graduate students work on topics such as marriage and divorce in the Old South; courtship and family life in the Victorian West, prostitution policies in the Progressive Era, and African American women’s role in the Civil Rights Movement. Several of her students also complete a Graduate Certificate in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, an interdisciplinary program that offers opportunities to work with faculty in other departments as well as funding to support research and scholarship on women, gender, and sexuality. Please contact her by e-mail if you are interested in working with her as a graduate student.
Field of Study
U.S. Social, Political, and Cultural History; Women, Family, Gender, and Sexuality; The American South; Progressive Era and New Deal
Education
PhD, Rice University, 1995
MA, Rice University, 1994
BA, Oberlin College, 1991
Selected Publications
Sophonisba Breckinridge: Championing Women's Activism in Modern America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019.
Topsy-Turvy: How the Civil War Turned the World Upside Down for Southern Children. New York: Ivan R. Dee, 2010.
Family Values in the Old South. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010.
Scarlett's Sisters: Young Women in the Old South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.
Major Problems in the History of American Families and Children. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2005.
Marriage in the Early Republic: Elizabeth and William Wirt and the Companionate Ideal. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.
Courses
Women in America: From the Colonial Era to the Civil War
Women in America: From the Civil War to the Present
The American South: From Slavery to Civil Rights
Women and Slavery: Slave Women, Slaveholding Women, and Antislavery Women
Southern Women in Black and White
Sexism and Racism: Black Women in America
Families and Children in America from the Colonial Era to the Present
The Historian’s Craft
Freshman Seminar for History Students
Introduction to Historical Methods
The Americans: To 1896
History Through Literature: Women in Victorian and Modern America
Graduate Seminar: Gender and Sexuality in American History
Graduate Seminar: Gender and Politics in American History
Graduate Seminar: U.S. Women’s History
Graduate Seminar: Gender, Society, and Politics in the U.S.
Graduate Research Seminar
Women’s and Gender Studies Senior Capstone (Co-Taught with Sara Hayden and Beth Hubble)
Feminism(s) and Film: First and Second Waves (Co-Taught with Sara Hayden, Comm. Studies)
Writing Women’s Lives: Biography, Microhistory, and Local History
Born in the U.S.A.: American History through Children’s Eyes (adult education)
Women’s Rights and Women’s Roles Around the World (global leadership initiative first-year seminar)
Women’s Activism and Human Rights in the U.S. (adult education)
Confederate, Union, and Contraband: The Drama of the Civil War (adult education)
