Corinne T. Field is Associate Professor of Women, Gender & Sexuality at the University of Virginia.  Her research focuses on the intersections of age, gender, and race in US history.  She is the author of The Struggle for Equal Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age, and the Fight for Citizenship in Antebellum America (University of North Carolina Press, 2014).  With LaKisha Simmons, she co-edited The Global History of Black Girlhood (University of Illinois Press, 2022), and with Nicholas Syrett, Age in America: Colonial Era to the Present (New York University Press, 2015).

Field is currently researching two historical monographs.  The first, Feminist Aging in Nineteenth-Century America: Old Age, Justice, and Power, explains how nineteenth-century activist intellectuals developed arguments for old age empowerment and old age justice, embedding a concern with women's aging in broader campaigns for freedom and equality.  The second, Looking Old: A US History, considers how visual assessment of oldness on human bodies shaped chattel slavery, modern courtship, industrial labor relations, and professional careers.  With David Troyansky, she is editing the nineteenth-century volume of the Bloomsbury Cultural History of Old Age.

During the 2022-2023 academic year, Field was an NEH Fellow at the Huntington Library, Pasadena, California.  She has held fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Schlesinger Library, and the American Antiquarian Society. 

Photo credit: Tony Rinaldo Photography

Selected publications:

2022               Co-editor with LaKisha Simmons, The Global History of Black Girlhood (University of Illinois Press).

2022               "Antifeminism, Anti-Blackness, and Antioldness: The Intersectional Aesthetics of Aging in the Nineteenth-Century United States," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, special issue, "Rethinking 'Fist Wave' Feminisms," 47, no. 4 (Summer): 843-83.

2021               "Old-Age Justice and Black Feminist History: Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman's Intersectional Legacies," Radical History Review, Special Issue on Old/Age 139 (January): 37-51.

2020             Co-editor and contributor with Nicholas Syrett, "AHR Roundtable: Chronological Age: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," American Historical Review (April): 371-459.

2019             "'What does come after?': Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Speculative Sociology of Aging Beyond Youth," Studies in American Fiction (Fall): 289-320.

2019             Invited co-editor with Lakisha Simmons, special issue of Women, Gender, and Families of Color 7, no. 1 (Spring).

2017             "What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Age in Early America?" Common-place.org 17, no. 2 

2015             Co-editor with Nicholas Syrett, Age in America: Colonial Era to the Present (New York University Press).

2014             The Struggle for Equal Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age and the Fight for Citizenship in Antebellum America (University of North Carolina Press, Gender and American Culture Series).