George and Ann RichardsCivil War Era Center

Hannah Katherine Hicks received her PhD in History from Vanderbilt University and specializes in nineteenth-century U.S. history, focusing on women and law and the intersections of gender, medicine, and law. Her dissertation, “Troubling Justice: Women and the Criminal Courts in the Post-Civil War South” draws on county-level court records to examine criminal courts in postbellum South Carolina and the primarily working-class Black and White women who frequently appeared in them as defendants, complainants, and witnesses. At the Richards Center, Hannah will work on turning this dissertation into a book manuscript. Hannah was most recently an Assistant Teaching Professor of History at UNC Charlotte, which is also her undergraduate alma mater. In Winter 2022, the Bulletin of the History of Medicine published her article entitled “A Conjure Woman in Court: African American Conjurers as Health Practitioners and Performative Poisoners in the Post-Emancipation South.” Hannah’s research has been supported by the American Historical Association, the South Caroliniana Library, the Wilson Library at UNC Chapel Hill, and the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt University.