Betty Luther Hillman
My dissertation, entitled "Dressing for Liberation: Gender Presentation in American Society, Culture, and Politics, 1964-1980," explores how dress, hairstyles, and gender presentation were political tools of social movements in the 1960s and 1970s, including the New Left, the hippie counterculture, Black Power, feminism, and gay liberation. Joanne Meyerowitz, George Chauncey, Matthew Jacobson, and Robert Gordon are the members of my committee. My oral exam fields were U.S. History 1865-present, U.S. Women's and Gender History, and Comparative Histories of Sexuality. I graduated from Harvard in 2003 and also received an M.A. in History from the University of Chicago in 2006.
My non-academic interests include Minnesota (I grew up in Minneapolis and, for those of you unaware, it's simply the best), twins (it's strange to me that no one in my academic life knows that I have a twin sister, since it was a pretty defining feature of my first 12 years of schooling), teaching and educational equality (I taught high school science at a charter school in Washington, DC prior to graduate school, and I've continued to teach high school students during the summer at programs like CTY), jogging (but very slowly), and San Francisco (where I am living for the 2009-2010 school year).
