Ann M. Little
Contact Information
Phone: 970.491.3112
Email: ann.little@colostate.edu
Twitter: Historiann
Website: http://historiann.com
Office: Clark B-341
Role: Faculty
Position: Professor
- Early North America; women's and gender history; history of sexuality; religious history; history of the body
Department: History
Biography
Specializing in the history of women, gender, and sexuality along with Professors Alexander, Jones, and Payne, Ann M. Little is the author of Abraham in Arms: War and Gender in Colonial New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2007), and of The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright (Yale University Press, 2016). Abraham in Arms was recognized with an Honourable Mention for the Albert B. Corey Prize/Prix Corey awarded jointly by the American Historical Association and the Canadian Historical Association in 2008. She has held fellowships at the Newberry Library the Huntington Library and the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Professor Little has also written for Common-place and chapters from Abraham in Arms were excerpted in Women s America: Refocusing the Past edited by Linda K. Kerber Cornelia Hughes Dayton and Jane Sherron DeHart (7th ed. Oxford University Press 2010) and in Major Problems in American Women's History(5th edition Cengage Learning edited by Sharon Block Ruth M. Alexander and Mary Beth Norton 2013). In addition to her purely scholarly work, Little blogs about history feminism and the academic life at Historiann. You can find her on Twitter at @Historiann.
In academic year 2014-15 she was at the Huntington Library in San Marino California as the Dana and David Dornsife Fellow to complete her book, The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright. Esther Wheelwright was an English girl taken captive by the Wabanaki in 1703 who became an Ursuline choir nun in Québec and the order's only foreign-born Mother Superior. Her life offers an opportunity to explore many different early American women s experiences: she crossed between three cultures in childhood and adolescence exchanging the Protestantism of her childhood for Catholicism among Wabanaki Indians and ultimately assumed in old age the powerful position of Mother Superior of the Ursuline convent in Québec. Wheelwright chose her own captivity and through her life we may explore the possibilities and limitations of gender in three North American cultures. Questions about the nature of captivity and liberty constraint and movement and security and danger pulse throughout the chapters.
Professor Little appeared on the TLC show Who Do You Think You Are on Sunday night, August 30, 2015 with Tom Bergeron to help him understand more about his French Canadian roots. You can also see Professor Little on C--SPAN 3: American History TV delivering a lecture in her American Women's History class on October 22 2012 on the subject of Stays and Colonial-era Clothing. She was also the subject of a recent "Humans of CSU" profile in the Rocky Mountain Collegian.
Education
A.B. Bryn Mawr College; M.A. and Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania
Publications
Books:
- 2016, The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright, Yale University Press, 304 pp.
- 2007, Abraham in Arms: War and Gender in Colonial New England, University of Pennsylvania Press, 264 pp.
Selected Refereed Journal Articles and Book Chapters:
- 2018, “The Shared Language of Gender in Colonial North American Warfare,” in The Routledge History of Gender, War, and the U.S. Military, edited by Kara Dixon Vuic (Taylor & Francis), 11-23.
- 2016, “Knox’s Historical Journal” and “Cloistered Bodies: Convents in the Anglo-American Imagination in the British Conquest of Canada,” reprinted in chapter 4, Rethinking Canada: The Promise of Women’s History (7th ed., Oxford University Press Canada, edited by Lara Campbell, Tamara Myers and Adele Perry), 61-75.
- 2015, “‘Keep me with you, so that I might not be damned:’ Age and Captivity in Colonial Borderlands Warfare, in Age in America: The Colonial Era to the Present, eds. Corinne Field and Nicholas L. Syrett (New York University Press), 23-46.
- 2013, “Indian Captivity and Family Life in Colonial New England,” an abridged excerpt of chapter 3 from Abraham in Arms, in Major Problems in American Women’s History (5th edition, Cengage Learning, edited by Sharon Block, Ruth M. Alexander, and Mary Beth Norton, 2013), 49-57.
- 2010 and 2016, “Captivity and Conversion: Daughters of New England in French Canada” an abridged excerpt of chapter 4 from Abraham in Arms, in Women’s America: Refocusing the Past,edited by Linda K. Kerber, Cornelia Hughes Dayton, and Jane Sherron DeHart (7th edition, Oxford University Press, 2010; 8th edition, 2016), 66-79.
- 2010, “We’re All Cowgirls Now,” Journal of Women’s History 22:4, 220-234.2009, “Gender and Sexuality in the North American Borderlands, 1492-1848,” History Compass 7, 1-10.
- 2006, “Cloistered Bodies: Convents in the Anglo-American Imagination in the British Conquest of Canada,” Eighteenth Century Studies 39:2, 187-200.
- 2002, “The Life of Mother Marie-Joseph de l’Enfant Jésus, or, How a little girl from Wells became a big French politician,” Maine History 40:4, 276-308.
- 2001, “‘Shoot that rogue, for he hath an Englishman’s coat on!’ Cultural Cross Dressing on the New England Frontier, 1620-1760,’” New England Quarterly 74:2, 238-273.
Curriculum Vitae
Courses
HIST 540: Material Culture
HIST 369: History of Sexuality in America
