Hannah Katherine Hicks received her PhD in History from Vanderbilt University and specializes in nineteenth-century U.S. history, focusing on women, race, and law and the intersections of gender, law, and medicine. Her book project, In Her Defense: Women and the Criminal Courts in the Post-Civil War South, draws on local court records to examine criminal courts in postbellum South Carolina and the primarily working-class Black and White women who appeared in them as defendants, complainants, and witnesses. Her work has appeared in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Women’s History Review, Journal of Family History, Nursing Clio, and the OAH’s American Historian magazine. Her research has received generous support from the American Historical Association, the South Carolinian Library, the Wilson Library at UNC Chapel Hill, the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt University, the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, and the American Society for Legal History.
