Laura R. Prieto

About Laura R. Prieto

Laura R. Prieto (B.A, Wellesley College; A.M, Ph.D, Brown University) is Program Director for Our Bodies Ourselves, directing the latest digital iteration of the pathbreaking book that initiated the global women’s health movement. She holds the concurrent position of Scholar-in-Residence at the Center for Women\'s Health and Human Rights at Suffolk University. Laura is also Professor Emerita of History and of Women’s and Gender Studies and was the inaugural Alumni Chair in Public Humanities in the Ifill College of Media, Arts, and Humanities at Simmons University. Harvard University Press published her book, At Home in the Studio: The Professionalization of Women Artists in America, in 2001. Her ongoing research concerns gender, race, and imperialism in the era of the Spanish-American War, encompassing both the Caribbean and Pacific along with the continental United States. Laura was a contributing editor for Crossings and Encounters, an anthology on race, gender, and the Atlantic World, published in 2020 by the University of South Carolina Press. Other publications include essays on anti-imperialist Clemencia Lopez (for the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era) and on Filipinas and women missionaries in the 1910s and 1920s (in Competing Kingdoms, Duke UP 2010; Paradoxes of Domesticity, Australia UP 2014; Women in Transnational History, Routledge 2016). In 2017-18, she was Visiting Professor and Research Associate in the Women\'s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School. She is currently writing a book about women’s suffrage movements across U.S. empire, before and after the 19th Amendment. She also co-directs the Mary Eliza Project, making publicly available the records (and stories) of over women who registered to vote in Boston in 1920. Specialties: Women and Gender, feminist studies, American cultural and social history, historical construction of race and ethnicity, history of sexuality, visual culture, imperialism

Experience

1. Program Director and Scholar-in-residence

   Our Bodies Ourselves

   Aug 2023 — Present

Education

• Wellesley College

  B.A.

• Wellesley College

  BA, French, History

  1986 — 1989

• Brown University

  AM, PhD, History

  1992 — 1997