Katherine Hijar

Assistant Professor of History
United States and Digital History

Degrees: B.A., University of California, Berkeley (high honors); M.A., Ph.D., The Johns Hopkins University

Selected Research: Katherine Hijar is the sole curator of an online exhibit at the American Antiquarian Society, entitled, "Beauty, Virtue, and Vice: Nineteenth-century American Womanhood in Prints." Her in-progress book manuscript is provisionally titled, "Dancing Girls, Nymphs of the Pave, and the G'hal Next Door: Imagining Women in American Cities, 1830-1870." Conference papers include "'Nymphs of the Pave' on the Page: Women's Place in Flash Society and Culture," Women, Gender, Sex: A Conference in Honor of Patricia Cline Cohen (2015); “'That ripe-lipped and rosy cheeked damsel': Voyeurism and Street Harassment in New York City, 1830-1860," Berkshire Conference on the History of Women (2014); “How the Nymph of the Pave became the G’hal Next Door: The Flash Press, George Thompson, and the Invention of the Idealized Prostitute,” Annual Meeting of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR) (2012); "Manly Rule and Middle-Class Femininity in Henry Bebie's Nineteenth-Century Baltimore Brothel Paintings," Destined for Men: Visual Materials for Male Audiences, 1750-1880, Center for the History of American Visual Culture (CHAViC) (2009).

Dr. Hijar specializes in nineteenth-century U.S. social and cultural history; her scholarship incorporates insights from a variety of disciplines. Her scholarly work centers on histories of women, race, masculinity, the ideological meanings of print and visual forms, and social relations of power in urban and intimate settings. Dr. Hijar also has expertise and interest in Digital History and Digital Humanities (DH). She has particular interest in developing scholarly work within innovative, spatially dynamic, multimedia digital presentation platforms. Dr. Hijar has received funding for her research from various private and public organizations, and awards include a year-long curatorial fellowship at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Dr. Hijar has served on two committees of the American Historical Association, The Graduate and Early Career Committee and the Committee on Women Historians. She is a core faculty member of the San Diego Digital Humanities working group, and serves on the editorial board of the recently rebooted Journal of MultiMedia History.