Virginia Scharff
Professor
• American West, Women's, Environmental, U.S. Social, Theory
Director
• Center for the Southwest
Profile
Professor Scharff offers courses including the history of women in the United States and the American West, environmental history, social theory, and writing as a historian. Scharff also serves as the director of the Center for the Southwest, which sponsors programs and events that bring scholars and the public to promote understanding of Southwestern history, culture, landscape, and environment. Dr. Scharff also enjoys a career as a mystery novelist. Under the pseudonym Virginia Swift, she has published two books: Bad Company (2002) and Brown-Eyed Girl (2000).
Education
B.A. in American Studies, Yale University, 1974
M.J. in Journalism, University of California at Berkeley, 1977
M.A. in History, University of Wyoming, 1981
Ph.D. in History, University of Arizona, 1987
Research
Women’s history, the American West, Environmental history, and Social Theory
Selected Publications
Editor, Seeing Nature Through Gender, University Press of Kansas, 2003
Twenty Thousand Roads: Women, Movement, and the West. University of California Press, 2003.
Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age. Free Press, 1991.
Awards
Women of the West Chair, Institute for the Study of the American West, Autry National Center of the American West, appointed 2003
Beinecke Senior Research Fellow, Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers and Borders Yale University
Distinguished Lecturer, Organization of American Historians, appointed 2003
Courses
US History to 1877; US History since 1877; Women in Modern World; US Social History; The 60's; Environmental History; World History; US Women Since 1865;US Environmental History, US since 1932; Women in the West; history as Writing; The West and The Rest; Social Theory and Social History; American Western History;