Tina A. Irvine, PhD
Tina A. Irvine, PhD
Historian of race, science, and society in the modern U.S.
Historian of race, science, and society in the modern U.S.
Tina A. Irvine, PhD
is an assistant professor of history at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.
She is a cultural and intellectual historian of the modern United States with particular interests in the politics of race, science, and power in the long twentieth century.
Her first book, Americanizing Appalachia: Mountain Workers, Regional Exceptionalism, and the Making of American Identity, 1890–1933, explores these and other issues, and is under advance contract with the University of Chicago Press.
Photo by Haley Sinn
RESEARCH
Americanizing Appalachia
Mountain Workers, Regional Exceptionalism, and the Making of American Identity, 1890–1933
This book weaves together cultural, intellectual, and scientific history to explain how and why reformers placed southern Appalachia in their crosshairs at the turn of the century.
It shows that the region, a rugged area of 150,000 square miles scattered across eight states, became the epicenter of turn-of-the-century debates about America’s biological and cultural past, and its modern economic, social, and political future. This book analyzes mountain reform as an overlooked component ofthe Americanization movement and as a response to concerns about a weakened color line in the Jim Crow South and increasingly immigrant-heavy North. In doing so, it places reformers’ view of mountaineers’ social and cultural reform in the period’s larger effort to create a homogeneous Protestant American culture rooted in mountaineers’ allegedly Anglo-Saxon folk traditions and values.
Amercanizing Appalachia is based on my dissertation, which was a finalist for the 2020 C. Vann Woodward Award and winner of that year's Melvin E. Bradford and Theodore C. Delaney Dissertation Prize. Revisions to the work were supported in 2022-2023 through a year-long fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS.)
From Eugenics to Genomics
The Politics of Race, Science, and Power in the Twentieth-Century United States
This project examines how eugenic thinking and ideas about biological hierarchy in the United States became embedded in places one might not expect, and shows how they became normalized within bureaucratic and scientific institutions.
It uncovers those legacies by defining eugenics broadly, identifying archival materials with explicit racial and hereditary discourse as well as those that provide insight into the more diffuse ways eugenic rationalities became embedded in public health administration, educational tracking systems, guidance counseling programs, immigration enforcement, insurance companies, disability governance, and carceral institutions throughout the twentieth century. By analyzing archival materials that illuminate explicit and more hidden forms of eugenic reasoning, From Eugenics to Genomics will show how eugenic thought evolved from its heyday in the 1910s and 1920s to a more subtle reform eugenics in the post-WWII period.
ACADEMIC WRITING
Articles
"Reconciling Democracy and Eugenics: Alice Lloyd and the Rehabilitation of the Kentucky Mountaineer," Journal of Southern History 89, no 4 (2023): 659-698.
https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2023.a909847.
Photo Credit: Special Collections Research Center, University of Kentucky Libraries, Lexington, KY.
Book Reviews
Review of Sharon Loury, Appalachian Nursing: A History, 1890-1960. (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2025) in Journal of Southern History, (forthcoming).Review of Jess Whatcott, Menace to the Future: A Disability and Queer History of Carceral Eugenics. (Duke University Press, 2024) in The American Historical Review, Vol. 130, Issue 4, (Dec. 2025), 1891–1893, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhaf455.
Review of Joseph O Jewell, White Man’s Work: Race and Middle-Class Mobility into the Progressive Era. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023), in The Journal of the Gilded Ageand Progressive Era 23, no. 2 (2024): 252–54. https://doi.org/10.1017/S153778142400001X.
Review of Jessica Barbata Jackson, Dixie's Italians: Sicilians, Race, and Citizenship in the Jim Crow Gulf South, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020) in Journal of Southern History, Vol. 87, No. 2, (2021) 353-354. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/791366
Review of Nancy Isenberg, WhiteTrash: The 400 Year Untold History of Class in America, (New York: VikingPress, 2016), in Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, Vol.116, Nos. 3 & 4. (Summer/ Autumn 2018), 509-511. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/142/article/714850/pdf
PUBLIC WRITING
- “JD Vance’s Vision of Appalachia is Nothing New,” Time: Made By History. https://time.com/6999981/j-d-vance-appalachia-history/, July 18, 2024
- “Climate Change Just Erased the Past in Kentucky. Where Will it Happen Next?” History News Network https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/183619 August 7, 2022.
- “How Come We Never Learned This in High School?” Teaching the History of American Eugenics to College Students, H-Eugenics, https://networks.h-net.org/node/5296/blog/teaching-and-eugenics/8059822/teaching-blog-5-%E2%80%9Chow-come-we-never-learned-high August 12, 2021.
CONTACT
tirvine@
purdue.edu
