Mary Odem
Associate Professor of Women's Studies and History
modem@emory.edu

Mary Odem received her Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Berkeley in 1989. Her areas of specialization within the field of U.S. history include women and gender, family, migration and ethnicity. Her research has focused on the ways in which capitalist development, urbanization, migration, and the expansion of state power have shaped and transformed gender, family, and race/ethnic relations. Odem's first book, Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States (1995) examines the gender, class, and racial tensions that fueled campaigns to control female sexuality in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This book won the President's Book Award for the best new book manuscript from the Social Science History Association and was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Book of 1996. She has also co-edited a collection of essays, Confronting Rape and Sexual Assault (1998), which brings together leading scholarship in the social sciences on the subject of sexual violence.

Her current research project addresses the socio-cultural contexts, processes and transformations of Latin American migration to the U.S. South since 1965. The project examines how diverse groups of migrants from Mexico and Central America have reconstructed community life and collective identity in urban and suburban South, focusing on the gender and family dimensions of this process.

Recent Women's Studies courses taught:
Multicultural History of Women in US (undergraduate)
Senior Seminar in Women's Studies (undergraduate)
History of Race, Gender & Sexuality in US (graduate)