Faculty

Sophie White

Assistant Professor

Field: Early American Studies (francophone), especially material culture studies, gender history and ethnic studies.

Profile: Sophie White has an M.A. (Hons) from the University of Edinburgh and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the Courtauld Institute, University of London.
She is a social and material culture historian, with a special focus on dress in French colonial Louisiana.
She has received fellowships and prizes from the British Academy, the Huntington Library, the Newberry Library, the Louisiana Historical Association and the Costume Society of America, among others. Her publications have appeared in journals such as The William and Mary Quarterly and Gender and History, and she has edited a special issue of Fashion Theory on dress & gender.

Current Project: Her current project explores the cultural and economic ramifications of goods, specifically clothing, in managing gender, ‘race’, class and ethnic encounters in French colonial Louisiana (1699-1769).

Teaching Interests: White teaches courses that cross disciplinary boundaries, on American material culture, colonial American cultural history, consumption studies, the gender division of labor, dress history.

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

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

““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, June 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

Contact Information
Office: 106 Decio Faculty Hall
Notre Dame, IN 46556
Phone: (574) 631-6529
Email: swhite1@nd.edu