Eva Payne is an Assistant Professor of History in the Department of History at the University of Mississippi. She is also co-director of the Invisible Histories Project – Mississippi, a Mellon Foundation-funded project that documents and preserves Mississippi’s LGBTQ+ history through oral histories and archival collecting.
Research Interests
Payne is a historian of the 19th- and 20th-century U.S. with a focus on women, gender, and sexuality and the U.S. in transnational perspective. Her research interests include Gender and Sexuality, Sexual and Intimate Labor, Immigration, and US foreign relations and empire.
Biography
Payne’s first book project, Empire of Purity: Americans and the International War on Sex Trafficking tracks the American activists who made prostitution and sex trafficking an international cause between the 1870s and 1930s. Doing so, it tells a larger story about the expansion of the US state and the growth of US empire. Drawing on multi-lingual research conducted in over twenty archives, the book is the first to connect American anti-prostitution and anti-trafficking efforts across continents. It demonstrates how frameworks and policies formulated at the turn of the century continue to govern both domestic and international anti prostitution and anti-trafficking policy today.
She is also engaged in a number of public history projects. She has worked on exhibitions of art and historical objects at museums and galleries, including the Harvard Art Museum and the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. At the University of Mississippi, she is co-director of the Invisible Histories Project – Mississippi, a Mellon Foundation-funded project that documents and preserves Mississippi’s LGBTQ+ history through oral histories and archival collecting.
Publications
Courses Taught
- HST 131 Intro to US History since 1877
- HST 428 US Women’s History
- HST 429 US Gender History
- HST 461 History on Location
- HST 490 Problems in History- America
- HST 494 Directed Readings in History
- HST 498 Undergrad Research Seminar in History
- HST 506 Historiography - US since Reconstruction
- HST 595 Introduction to Public History
- HST 596 Queer Mississippi
- HST 614 Readings: US Women's and Gender History
- HST 615 Readings-Sexuality in Modern US History
- HST 641 Readings in Global History: Gender
Education
Ph.D. American Studies, Harvard University (2017)