Landon Storrs
Associate Professor (United States, Social, Political)
545 Agnes Arnold Hall
(713) 743-3091
lstorrs@uh.edu

Dr. Storrs specializes in twentieth-century U.S. social and political history, particularly in the history of women, social movements, and public policy. She came to the University of Houston in 1995 after earning her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In addition to her teaching and research (see below), Professor Storrs reviews books and article manuscripts for many journals, including Reviews in American History, Journal of American History, Journal of Women's History, Social Politics, and Feminist Studies. She currently directs several dissertations and theses, and she serves or has served on the History Department’s graduate, undergraduate, and executive committees, in addition to various search committees. She also is active in the UH Women’s Studies Program.

Teaching:
Dr. Storrs’s undergraduate course in U.S. Women’s History since 1840 (History 3320) reflects her research interests in women’s paid and unpaid labor, reform movements, feminism, and changing constructions of femininity. In addition to looking at how women’s historical experience has differed from men’s, the course emphasizes how women’s experiences have varied depending on factors such as their class, race, ethnicity, and sexual identity. Another undergraduate class, U.S. History from 1929 to 1945 (History 4311), examines how the crises of the Great Depression and World War II shaped American society, politics, and state development. Dr. Storrs’s section of the survey class, U.S. History since 1877 (History 1378), considers how ordinary people as well as powerful elites have shaped American politics, foreign relations, and culture. At the graduate level, she teaches seminars on U.S. women’s history, the U.S. welfare state, twentieth-century politics and reform, and The Professional Historian.

Research and Publications:
Professor Storrs’s first book, Civilizing Capitalism: The National Consumers’ League, Women’s Activism, and Labor Standards in the New Deal Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2000), analyzed female reformers’ campaign for state and national wage-hour laws during the Great Depression, when industry migration toward low-cost labor in the U.S. South was driving down wages nationwide. Her current research is on anticommunist loyalty investigations of women in government from the 1930s through the 1950s. Articles by Dr. Storrs have been published in the Journal of American History, Journal of Policy History, Labor’s Heritage, and Searching for Their Places: Southern Women across Four Centuries (University of Missouri Press, 2003).

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