Renee Sentilles

Associate Professor of History
Department of History
College of Arts and Sciences

Professor Sentilles specializes in American women’s history, gender and sexuality, childhood/youth, The American West,  and nineteenth and twentieth century U. S. cultural history.

Professor Sentilles is currently working on a book-and-website project called “In Her Shoes: Getting to the Sole of American Women’s History” that uses shoes as an entry point into multicultural women’s history. She is the author of Performing Menken: Adah Isaacs Menken and the Birth of American Celebrity (Cambridge University Press, 2003), American Tomboys, 1850-1915 (University of Massachusetts, 2018), and various articles and review essays.

Download / View Renee Sentilles' Curriculum Vitae

Research Information

Research Interests

  • American history and culture: high, low, nineteenth-century, current events, the West, the South, gender and race, politics and pop
  • Cultural expression (principally published and unpublished writings, popular music and theatre, visual arts and film)
  • Gender and multicultural studies
  • Regional cultures and the relationship between cultures
  • Examining how historical narratives are created and told, and analyzing how and why certain details are consistently left out.

Publications

Title of Work
Performing Menken: Adah Isaacs Menken and the Birth of American Celebrity
Publication Date
Title of Work
American Tomboys, 1850-1915
Publication Date

Additional Information

Professor Sentilles specializes in American women’s history, gender and sexuality, childhood/youth, The American West,  and nineteenth and twentieth century U. S. cultural history.

Professor Sentilles is currently working on a book-and-website project called “In Her Shoes: Getting to the Sole of American Women’s History” that uses shoes as an entry point into multicultural women’s history.  She is the author of Performing Menken: Adah Isaacs Menken and the Birth of American Celebrity (Cambridge University Press, 2003), American Tomboys, 1850-1915 (University of Massachusetts, 2018), and various articles and review essays.

Download / View CV