Sophie White

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Assistant Professor
M.A. University of Edinburgh
M.A. &  Ph. D. Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London

1042 Flanner Hall
University of Notre Dame
Office: (574) 631-6529
Fax: (574) 631-4399
email: swhite1@nd.edu
 

Profile

Sophie White is a social and material culture historian with an interdisciplinary focus on encounters between Europeans, Native Americans and Africans in early America.

She has received fellowships and prizes from the British Academy, the Huntington Library, the Newberry Library, the Louisiana Historical Association, and the Joseph L. Peyser Endowment for the Study of New France, among others.

She was a recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities for 2010-11, for work on her first book.

Courses:

  • CSEM 23102 Sec 04 Clothes Make the Man

  • AMST 30132 Men, Women and Work

  • AMST 30143 Fashioning American Identities

  • AMST 43137 The Meaning of Things

Books & Edited Volumes

  •  Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial Louisiana (University of Pennsylvania Press/ McNeil Series in Early American Studies, forthcoming 2012)

  •  “Slave Cultures and Globalization in the Eighteenth-Century French Empire” (in progress)

  •  Guest Editor, special issue of Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, on “Dress and Gender” Vol. 9, issue 2 (June 2005)-

Select Articles & Chapters:

  •  "Massacre, Mardi Gras, and Torture in Early New Orleans" The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 70:1 (January 2013, forthcoming"

  •  "To ensure that he not give himself over to Sauvages: Cleanliness, Frenchification, and Whiteness," Journal of Early American History 2 (July 2012, forthcoming)

  • “Geographies of Slave Consumption: French Colonial Louisiana and a World of Things” Winterthur Portfolio 44 (2011): 229-48

  • “‘A Baser Commerce: Retailing, Class, and Gender in French Colonial New Orleans,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 63:3 (2006), 517-50

  •  ““This Gown ... Was Much Admired and Made Many Ladies Jealous”: Fashion and the Forging of Elite Identities in French Colonial Louisiana,” in George Washington’s South, edited by Greg O’Brien and Tamara Harvey (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004), 86-118 (reissued in paperback,  2005) 

  •  “‘Wearing three or four handkerchiefs around his neck, and elsewhere about him’: Slaves’ Constructions of Masculinity and Ethnicity in French Colonial New Orleans,” Gender & History 15: 3 (November 2003), 528-49, reprinted in Dialogues of Dispersal: Gender, Sexuality and African Diasporas, ed. by Sandra Gunning, Tera W. Hunter and Michele Mitchell (Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 132-153