Brenna Greer
Associate Professor of History
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Historian of race, gender, and culture in 20th century U.S. with focus on African American business and visual culture.
Brenna Wynn Greer is an Associate Professor of History at Wellesley College. She is a cultural historian of race, gender, citizenship, and culture in the twentieth-century United States, who explores historical connections between capitalism, social movements, and media and visual culture. Her first book, Represented: The Black Imagemakers Who Reimagined African American Citizenship, recipient of the 2020 Harry Shaw and Katrina Hazard-Donald Award for Outstanding Work in African-American Popular Culture Studies, examines the historical circumstances that made the media representation of black citizenship good business in the post-World War II era. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Nation, Daily Mail, Columbia Journalism Review, and Enterprise & Society, as well as several edited volumes. Dr. Greer is currently at work on her second book, Issues of Color, which examines the postwar development of black commercial publishing and its significance within U.S. culture and black life. This work exemplifies her increasing turn toward Book Studies as a method for understanding the past experiences, contributions, thought, and creativity of, especially, marginalized groups in the past.
Greer has received support for her research from prominent organizations such as the Rare Books School, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Woodrow Wilson National Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. As Wellesley faculty, she held the Knafel Assistant Professor of Social Sciences chair and has 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; Black Lives Matter in Print & Pictures; ; and The Big Picture: U.S. History through Iconic Photography.
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
The United States History since 1865
HIST204
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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United States Consumer Culture and Citizenship
HIST220
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.