Virginia Scharff

Professor • American West, Women's, Environmental, U.S. Social, Theory
Director • Center for the Southwest

Contact

email: vscharff@unm.edu

office: Mesa Vista 2059

office phone: (505) 277-4344

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