Virginia Scharff
Virginia Scharff, Distinguished Professor of History and director of the Center for the Southwest at the University of New Mexico and Women of the West Chair at the Autry National Center, specializes in the histories of women and of the American West. Her publications include Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age (1991); Present Tense: The United States Since 1945 (1996); Coming of Age: America in the Twentieth Century (1998); Twenty Thousand Roads: Women, Movement, and the West (2003); Home Lands: How Women Made the West (2010), coauthored with Carolyn Brucken; and The Women Jefferson Loved (2010). She is editor of Seeing Nature Through Gender (2003) and Empire and Liberty: The Civil War and the West (2015). Scharff also writes mystery novels under the nom de plume of Virginia Swift, including Brown-Eyed Girl (2000), Bad Company (2002), Bye, Bye, Love (2004) and Hello, Stranger (2006).