Bonnie Hagerman is an Associate Professor, General Faculty of Women, Gender & Sexuality at the University of Virginia and serves as the department’s Director of Undergraduate Programs.  Her research focuses on women, gender, and sport, and 20th-century American social history.

Her courses include “A History of American Sportswomen,” “Global Perspectives on Gender and Sport,” “Gender & the Olympic Games,” and “Race, Gender & Sport.” She also teaches “History of Gender & Sexuality, 1865 to the Present.”

Hagerman’s book, Skimpy Coverage: Sports Illustrated and the Shaping of the Female Athlete was published in May 2023 by the University of Virginia Press (https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/5881/) and explores Sports Illustrated’s treatment of female athletes since the iconic magazine’s founding in 1954. The first book-length study of its kind, this accessible account charts the ways in which Sports Illustrated—arguably the leading sports publication in postwar America—engaged with the social and cultural changes affecting women’s athletics and the conversations about gender and identity they spawned.

Her current research project explores the accomplishments of female athletes in the 1920s and makes the argument that those achievements were crucial to making the decade a “Golden Age of Sport” in the United States.