Brenna Greer
Associate Professor of History
Historian of race, gender, and culture in 20th century U.S. with focus on African American business and visual culture.
Brenna Wynn Greer is a historian of race, gender, and culture in the twentieth century United States, who explores historical connections between capitalism, social movements and visual culture. Her first book, Represented: The Black Imagemakers Who Reimagined African American Citizenship (University of Pennsylvania Press), examines the historical circumstances that made the media representation of black citizenship good business in the post-World War II era. She is currently at work on her second book, which examines the postwar development of black commercial publishing and its significance within U.S. culture and black life.
A past Woodrow Wilson and ACLS fellow, Greer is an Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography 2018-2010 Junior Fellow. As Wellesley faculty, she has held the Knafel Assistant Professor of Social Sciences chair and been awarded the Anna and Samuel Pinanski Teaching Award. She teaches topics in twentieth century U.S. and African American history, including: Constructing “America” and Americans” in U.S. History since 1865; The Cold War United States; The United States in the World War II Era; U.S. Consumer Culture and Citizenship; The Civil Rights Movement Reconsidered; Fashion Matters: Dress, Style, and Politics in U.S. History; Telling Stories: The Politics of Narrating the Black Freedom Struggle; and Seeing Black: African Americans and U.S. Visual Culture.
COURSES
HIST204 The United States History since 1865
HIST220 United States Consumer Culture and Citizenship
HIST249 Cold War Culture and Politics in the United States
HIST252 The Civil Rights Movement Reconsidered
HIST254 The United States in the World War II Era
HIST314 Seminar: Fashion Matters: Dress, Style, and Politics in U.S. History
HIST340 Seminar: Seeing Black: African Americans and United States Visual Culture
HIST341 Seminar: Telling Stories: The Politics of Narrating the Black Freedom Struggle
Education
- B.A., Beloit College
- M.A., University of Wisconsin (Madison)
- Ph.D., University of Wisconsin (Madison)
Current and upcoming courses
Black Lives Matter in Print
HIST255
"The history of black liberation movements in the United States could be characterized as a struggle over images,” claimed activist and scholar bell hooks. In this course, students study how, throughout U.S. history, Black people – and their allies – have produced images of Black people and Black experiences as part of their liberation and survival campaigns. Inherent to this exercise is the analysis of print materials in which these pictures circulated. Therefore, in addition to learning how to analyze pictures as both images and historical sources, students will draw on book studies practices, which treat books as objects, the physicality of which holds clues to the past. The “books” – or material objects – of this course include newspapers, slave narratives, pamphlets, magazines, photographs, and even iPhone videos. Whenever possible, we will do hands-on analysis, using materials in Wellesley’s special collections and from the instructor’s personal archive. Students will learn to read visuals and print objects for evidence of Black people’s circumstances and resources, and for how existing materials and technologies enabled and limited Black freedom demands.
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This course explores the history of fashion in U.S. social and political movements. How have people used clothing and style to define themselves, demand recognition, challenge power, publicize injustice, and deflect or attract attention? We will examine how ideologies and experiences of race, gender, sexuality, and nationhood shaped uses of and reactions to fashion politics. Topics include the end of slavery, the rise of the “New Woman,” the Second World War, the civil rights movement, the women's liberation movement, the rise of hip hop, and the war on terror. Through these events, we will consider the political significance of hair, uniforms, campaign fashion, and religious dress. We will also consider how authenticity, imitation, appropriation, and commodification figure into this history.
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The United States' past is one of making and remaking the nation—as a government, a place, and a concept. This course surveys that dynamic process from the Reconstruction period through 9/11. Examining the people, practices, and politics behind U.S. nation building, we will consider questions of how different groups have defined and adopted "American" identities, and how definitions of the nation and citizenship shifted in relation to domestic and global happenings. This will include considering how ideas of gender, race, ethnicity, and citizenship intersected within projects of nation building. We will cover topics that include domestic race relations, U.S. imperialism, mass consumption, globalization, and terrorism, and developments such as legalized segregation, the Depression, World Wars I and II, and modern social progressive and conservative movements.
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We are a nation organized around an ethos of buying things. Throughout the twentieth century, the government, media, big business, and the public increasingly linked politics and consumerism, and the formulation has been a route to empowerment and exclusion. In this course, we study how and why people in the United States theorized about, practiced, and promoted mass material consumption from the turn of the twentieth century into the twenty-first. Topics will include: the rise of consumer culture; the innovations of department stores, malls, freeways, and suburbs; developments in advertising and marketing; the global position of the American consumer in the post-World War II United States; and the political utility of consumption to various agendas, including promoting free enterprise, combating racism, and battling terrorism.