University of California Presidential Chair and professor of history at the University of California, Riverside, Catherine Allgor teaches classes on early America, politics, and the history of women's lives and gender. Her dissertation on women and politics in early Washington garnered the OAH Lerner-Scott Dissertation Prize and, as Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government (2000), won the James H. Broussard First Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. Her latest book, A Perfect Union: Dolley Madison and the Creation of the American Nation (2006), was a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize.

Lecture topics:

• Society Ladies and Political Parties: A Study in American Women's History
• Dolley Madison and the Creation of the American Nation
• What is this Thing Called "Gender"?
• Remembering the Ladies in the Story of the Founding

Viewed Friday, November 20, 2009