Writing on women, gender, and the everyday life of American culture — from the mill cities of New England to the postwar imagination of Peyton Place.
Ardis Cameron is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Southern Maine.
She received her Ph.D. in history at Boston College in 1986 and has taught at the University of Massachusetts Boston, Wheaton College, and Harvard University. In 2019 she served as a Visiting Professor in the International Gender and Women Studies Program at the University of Bern, Switzerland.
She is the author of Radicals of the Worst Sort: The Laboring Women of Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1888–1912 (University of Illinois Press, 1994), Looking for America: The Visual Production of Nation and People (Blackwell, 2004), and Unbuttoning America: A Biography of Peyton Place (Cornell University Press, 2015), as well as numerous articles on women, gender, and labor history.
She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Senior Research Fellowship and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship.
Histories of women, gender, labor, and the visual culture of American life.
Books and essays examining how ordinary people shape — and are shaped by — popular culture.
Lectures and conversations on Peyton Place, gender history, and reading the everyday image.
Decades of graduate and undergraduate teaching across history and gender studies.
Featured commentary on the cultural afterlife of Grace Metalious and mid-century America.
New writing on memory, place, and the politics of looking in twentieth-century America.
A selection of monographs and edited editions spanning labor history, visual culture, and the postwar American novel.
A Biography of Peyton Place
Mining interviews, fan letters, and archival materials, Cameron tells how a patricide in a small New England village became a cultural phenomenon — and a quiet preface to second-wave feminism.
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The Visual Production of Nation and People
A groundbreaking collection on the role of the visual in shaping American national identity — race, gender, ethnicity, and the politics of who is seen.
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Laboring Women in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1860–1912
A landmark labor and gender history recovering the lives of immigrant women whose strikes and street politics reshaped industrial America.
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By Grace Metalious — Introduction by Ardis Cameron
An insightful introduction examining the novel's treatment of class, gender, race, ethnicity, and power, and its place in American literary history.
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By Grace Metalious — With an Introduction by Ardis Cameron
The sizzling sequel reissued with a new introduction that situates Metalious within the cultural politics of postwar America.
Read moreNew essays in progress on memory, place, and the postwar American novel.
Visiting Professor — International Gender and Women Studies Program, University of Bern, Switzerland.
Unbuttoning America: A Biography of Peyton Place published by Cornell University Press.
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship awarded in the field of U.S. History.