George and Ann RichardsCivil War Era Center

Cathleen D. Cahill is the Walter L. Ferree and Helen P. Ferree Professor in Middle-American History at the Pennsylvania State University and previously taught at the University of New Mexico. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2004. In 2009-10, she was a Bill and Rita Clements Fellow at Southern Methodist University where she completed Federal Fathers and Mothers: A Social History of the United States Indian Service, 1869-1933 (2011). It won the 2011 Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award and was a finalist for the Weber-Clements Book Prize. She is also the author of Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement (2020), which received honorable mention for both the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era’s President’s Book Prize and for the Armitage-Jameson Book Prize awarded by the Coalition for Western Women’s History. Cahill recently co-edited Indian Cities: Histories of Indigenous Urbanism (2022) with Kent Blansett and Andrew Needham. Her new research project, “Is New Mexico Going to Line Up  with Texas?” explores African American women’s voting activism in the American West after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.

Areas of Specialization:

Nineteenth Century U.S.: