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Rebecca Sharpless, PhD
Professor
r.sharpless@tcu.edu817-257-5645Reed Hall 329
Program Affiliations
Education
PhD, American Studies/Women's Studies, Emory University (1993)
MA, American Studies, Baylor University (1983)
BA, English, Baylor University, Magna cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa (1978)
Courses Taught
HIST 10603 United States History: A Survey to 1877
HIST 10613 United States History: A Survey since 1877
HIST 30603 History of Women in America
HIST 30643 History of Food in America
HIST 30683 History of Queer America
HIST 40743 History of Texas
HIST 40823 US South since 1865
Areas of Focus
Women in America and the South, Texas, food, sexuality, labor
- Book Chapters & Reviews
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“In Favor of our Fathers’ Country and Government’: Unionist Women in North Texas." In Texas Women and the Civil War: Diversity and Dissidence in the Trans-Mississippi. Edited by Deborah Linsley Liles and Angela Boswell. Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2016. -
“Sallie McNeill: A Woman’s Higher Education in Antebellum Texas.” In Texas Women: Their Histories, Their Lives. Edited by Elizabeth Hayes Turner, Stephanie Cole, and Rebecca Sharpless, 82-104. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015.
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- Articles & Essays
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"‘She Ought to Have Taken Those Cakes’: Southern Women and Rural Food Supplies.” Southern Cultures 18, no. 2 (summer 2012), 45-58. -
“Neither Friends nor Peers: Idella Parker, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and the Limits of Gender Solidarity at Cross Creek.” Journal of Southern History 78, no. 2 (May 2012), 327-60.
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- Edited Volumes
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Texas Women: Their Histories, Their Lives. (Co-editor with Elizabeth Hayes Turner and Stephanie Cole.) Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015. -
Work, Family, and Faith: Rural Southern Women in the Twentieth Century. (Co-editor, with Melissa Walker.) Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006.
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- Books
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People of the Wheat: Cultivation and Culture in North Texas. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2026. -
Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. -
Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865-1960. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. -
Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices: Women on Texas Cotton Farms, 1900-1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.
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- Agricultural History Society
- Alliance for Texas History
- American Historical Association
- Oral History Association
- Organization of American Historians
- Southern Association for Women Historians
- Southern Historical Association
- Texas Foodways Alliance
- Editor, Journal of Texas History, since 2024
- President, Southern Association for Women Historians, 2013
- Executive Council, Texas State Historical Association, 2010-2016
- President, Oral History Association, 2006
Last Updated: July 31, 2026