Susan L. Johnson

Associate Professor, Chican@ and Latin@ Studies Program
Associate Professor, Department of History

Education

• Ph.D., Yale
• M.A., Arizona State University
• B.A., Carthage College

Specialization and research interests
I am a historian of the North American West who specializes in gender, sexuality and race/ethnicity. I work primarily in the nineteenth century, but also reach back into the eighteenth century and forward into the twentieth century. My work has focused on relations of power in western North America both as a place of lived experience and as an imagined space.

Selected Publications

• Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000).
• The Lesbian Issue: Essays from SIGNS (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), co-edited with Estelle Freedman, Barbara Gelpi, and Kathleen Weston.
• "My own private life: Toward a History of Desire in Gold Rush California," in Rooted in Barbarous Soil: People, Culture, and Community in Gold Rush California (2000).
• "A memory sweet to soldiers': The Significance of Gender in the History of the 'American West,'" Western Historical Quarterly 24, no.4 (1993).

Contact Susan L. Johnson