Laura Prieto

Dr. Laura Prieto is a cultural historian, teacher, and writer. She joined Simmons in 1997, with a joint appointment in the History and the Women's and Gender Studies Departments. For several years, she directed the graduate program in history. She was Visiting Professor and Research Associate in the Women's Studies in Religion Program at the Harvard Divinity School (2017–2018) and previously held the Ruth R. and Alyson R. Miller Fellowship at the Massachusetts Historical Society.

She taught a wide spectrum of undergraduate and graduate courses in American history, gender history, race and ethnicity, the history of sexuality, historical methodology, archives and history, memory studies, and cross-cultural imperialism.

Education

• AM, PhD, Brown University
• BA, Wellesley College

Courses

• HIST 141 Modern America
• HIST 213 Race and Ethnicity in United States History
• HIST/WGST 215 Women and Gender in the U.S. before 1890
• HIST/WGST 216 Women and Gender in the U.S. since 1890
• HIST/WGST 239 History of Sexuality and the Family
• HIST 360/560 Seminar in Women’s History
• HIST 373/573 Seminar in Nineteenth-Century America 
• HIST 374/574 Seminar in Modern America
• HIST 375/575 Cold War Culture
• HIST 379/579 Expansion and Empire in U.S. History
• HIST 397/597 Historical Methods and Research
• HIST 527 Archives, History, and Collective Memory
• GCS 410 Gender, Race, and Imperialism in Historical Perspective

Community Engagement

Dr. Prieto served as the first Alumni Chair in Public Humanities at Simmons. In this role, she developed a series of projects and programs to engage the public in thinking about the meanings and legacies of the women's suffrage movement. A parallel project in 2019–20, funded by a grant from the Council of Independent Colleges, engaged students in research about Boston’s old West End, a vibrant immigrant neighborhood that was razed in the name of urban renewal in the 1950–60s.

Publications

Dr. Prieto’s work focuses on women and gender, especially at the turn of the twentieth century; visual culture; and cultural history. She wants to increase awareness of how traces of the past are all around us, consciously and unconsciously connecting the present to what came before. She hopes to make women's and gender history more accessible and visible to the public — including through her blog at Nursing Clio. She regularly organizes edit-a-thons to help improve the coverage of women's history on Wikipedia.

Her first book, At Home in the Studio: The Professionalization of Women Artists in America (Harvard University Press, 2001) studies how women painters, sculptors, and illustrators created a professional identity for themselves in the face of exclusion. She subsequently created an online project for "Women and Social Movements in the United States" about nineteenth-century American women sculptors and how they used art to contribute to the abolitionist and women's rights movements.

Her individual research focus concerns American women and colonized women, especially Filipinas, in the wake of the Spanish-American War. Her book Bibles, Baseball and Butterfly Sleeves: Filipina Women and American Protestant Missions, 1900–1930 traces how the women’s missionary movement played out in the archipelago during the era of American colonization. She has published related essays in Women in Transnational History (Routledge, 2016), "Paradoxes of Domesticity: Christian Missionaries and Women in Asia and the Pacific" (Australia National University Press, 2014), and "Competing Kingdoms: Women, Nation, Mission and American Empire" (Duke University Press, 2010).

Other published work includes, "‘A Delicate Subject': Clemencia López, Civilized Womanhood, and the Politics of Anti-Imperialism," Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (April 2013) and "Dazzling Visions: American Women, Race, and the Imperialist Origins of Modern Nursing in Cuba, 1898-1916," Nursing History Review (January 2018).