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
The History of Americans' Global War on Prostitution
From the publisher:
Between the 1870s and 1930s, American social reformers, working closely with the US government, transformed sexual vice into an international political and humanitarian concern. As these activists worked to eradicate prostitution and trafficking, they promoted sexual self-control for both men and women as a cornerstone of civilization and a basis of American exceptionalism. Empire of Purity traces the history of these efforts, showing how the policing and penalization of sexuality was used to justify American interventions around the world.
Selected Article(s):
Featured Publication Title Text: “Deportation as Rescue: White Slaves, Women Reformers, and the US Bureau of Immigration,” Journal of Women's History 33 no. 4 (2021): 40-66
Courses Taught
- HIST 1310 Intro to US History Since 1877
- HIST 4280 US Women’s History
- HIST 4290 US Gender History
- HIST 4610 History on Location
- HIST 4900 Problems in History: America
- HIST 4940 Directed Readings in History
- HIST 4980 Undergrad Research Seminar in History
- HIST 5060 Historiography of US Since Reconstruction
- HIST 5950 Introduction to Public History
- HIST 5960 Queer Mississippi
- HIST 6140 Readings in US Women's and Gender History
- HIST 6150 Readings in Sexuality in Modern US History
- HIST 6410 Readings in Global History: Gender
Education
Ph.D. American Studies, Harvard University (2017)