Victoria W. Wolcott

PhD

Prof. Victoria Wolcott.

Victoria W. Wolcott

PhD

Victoria W. Wolcott

PhD

Fields

20th century United States History; African American History; Gender and Sexuality; Social and Cultural History; Urban History

Education

  • PhD, University of Michigan, 1995
  • BA, New York University, 1989, magna cum laude

Courses Regularly Taught

HIS 162:  U.S. History II
HIS 379: African American History
HIS 306:  The City in American History
HIS 306:  Civil Rights in America
HIS 419: Race and the American City
HIS 459: American Utopias
HIS 503:  American History Core II
HIS 550:  The Long Civil Rights Movement

Current Research

My current research investigates the life and work of a Black pacifist and athlete during the cold war. This will culminate in a microhistory tentatively titled, The Embodied Resistance of Eroseanna Robinson: Athleticism and Activism in the Cold War Era. I am also editing and contributing to a collection of interdisciplinary essays on utopianism for SUNY Press’s “Humanities to the Rescue” series, Utopian Imaginings: Saving the Future in the Present.

Selected Publications

Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022)

“Networks of Resistance: Floria Pinkney and Labor Interracialism in Interwar America,” Journal of African American History 105, 4 (Fall 2020): 567-592.

Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters: The Struggle Over Segregated Recreation in America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012)

Remaking Respectability: African-American Women in Interwar Detroit (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 2001)

“Radical Nonviolence, Interracial Utopias and the Congress of Racial Equality in the early Civil Rights Movement,”  inThe Journal of Civil and Human Rights, 4, 2 (Fall/Winter 2018): 31-61

“Recreation and Race in the Postwar City: Buffalo’s 1956 Crystal Beach Riot,” Journal of American History (June 2006): 63-90.

“The Culture of the Informal Economy:  Numbers Runners in Inter-War Black Detroit,” The Radical History Review (Fall 1997): 46-75.

“‘Bible, Bath, and Broom’:  Nannie Helen Burroughs, the National Training School, and the Uplift of the Race,” Journal of Women’s History (Spring 1997): 88-110.

Awards

  • Humanities Institute Fellowship, University at Buffalo, Spring 2020
  • National Endowment for the Humanities, Fellowship, Spring 2016
  • Distinguished Lecturer, Organization of American Historians, 2014-present
  • Susan B. Anthony Institute Research Grant, University of Rochester, Spring 2010
  • Abraham J. Karp Award for Excellence in Teaching, University of Rochester, Spring 2005
  • Beveridge Grant, American Historical Association, 2002