Faculty
Turk, Katherine
Assistant Professor , HIST/HUHI
Office: JO 3.928
Phone: 972-883-6908
Email: Katherine.turk@utdallas.edu
Areas of Specialization: Women and gender, law and political economy, and the twentieth century United States
Education: MA in History, University of Chicago, 2007
PhD in History, University of Chicago, 2011
Katherine Turk is Assistant Professor of History. She teaches courses on women and gender, law and political economy, and the twentieth century United States. She earned her undergraduate degree from Northwestern University with honors in History and Political Science, and she also holds a graduate certificate in Women, Policy and Political Leadershipfrom American University. She received an MA in History in 2007 and a PhD in History with distinction in 2011, both from the University of Chicago. At Chicago, Dr. Turk was awarded the Wayne Booth Prize for Excellence in Teaching. She also received the 2012 Lerner-Scott Prize from the Organization of American Historians for the best doctoral dissertation in women's history. She was on leave from UTD in 2011-2012 while she held a Jerome Hall Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law.
Professor Turk researches the mainstreaming of postwar American feminism and the challenges of defining and creating sex equality amidst fractious interest group politics, legal and bureaucratic institutions, diverse populations ofworkers, and seismic shifts in American political economy. Her first book, Equality on Trial: Sex and Gender at Work in the Age of Title VII, analyzes struggles to interpret and implement workplace sex discrimination law from the 1960s to the early 1990s. Apart from revising that manuscript for publication, her current projects include a study of office work and secretaries' rights consciousness from the 1940s to the 1990s and a study of men and masculinity in postwar movements for women's and gay rights. Her articles have been published in the Journal of American History, the Indiana Magazine of History, and Law and History Review (forthcoming in 2013). Her work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation and the American Society for Legal History.