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Diane Miller Sommerville


Visiting Associate Professor
Ph.D., 1995, Rutgers University
19th-Century U.S., U.S. South, Women's History, Race, Sexuality
Office: LT 704  
Phone: (607) 777-2251 E-mail: sommervi@binghamton.edu

Diane Sommerville's research interests encompass race, gender, and the American South. Her first research project, which culminated in the publication of her first book, Rape and Race in the Nineteenth-Century South, traces the evolution of white southerners' fears of black rape by examining actual cases of black-on-white rape throughout the nineteenth century. Her current project is a study of suicide among Southerners during and after the Civil War that explores how gender shaped decisions about suicide in the wake of war's physical and emotional devastation. Her teaching areas include the 19th-century U.S., the American South, U.S. Women's history, Civil War and Reconstruction, History of Sexuality in the U.S., and African-American History. She is currently on leave from Fairleigh Dickinson University in Madison, New Jersey.

Current Project:

  • Aberration of Mind: Suicide, the Civil War and Gender in the American South

Publications:

  • Rape and Race in the Nineteenth-Century South (University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 
  • “Moonlight, Magnolias, and Brigadoon, or “Almost Like Being In Love”: Mastery and Sexual Exploitation in Eugene Genovese's Plantation South.” Radical History Review (Winter 2004).
  • "'I was very much wounded': Rape Law, Children, and the Antebellum South," in Sex Without Consent: Rape and Sexual Coercion in America, ed. Merril Smith (New York University Press, February 2002).
  • “Rape, Race and Castration in Slave Law in the Colonial and Early South,” in The Devil's Lane: Sex and Race in the Early South, eds. Catherine Clinton and Michele Gillespie (Oxford University Press, 1997).
  • “The Rape Myth in the Old South Reconsidered,” Journal of Southern History (August 1995). Reprinted in Myths America (Brandywine Press, 1997) and in A Question of Manhood: A Reader in U.S. Black Men's History and Masculinity, edited by Darlene Clark Hine and Earnestine Jenkins (Indiana University Press, 2001).

     Awards and Honors :
  • Phi Alpha Theta Award, Best First Book Award, 2005 (Rape and Race in the 19th-Century South).
  • Maddy Award for Excellence, Becton College Teacher of the Year, FDU, 2001-2002 (student award).
  • Becton College Teacher of the Year, FDU, 2000-2001 (faculty award).
  • Golieb Post-Doctoral Fellowship, New York Law School (1998-99, 1999-2000). Declined.
  • A. Elizabeth Taylor for Best Article in Southern Women's History, Southern Association for Women Historians (1996).
  • Graduate Dissertation Fellowship, Rutgers University (1995).
  • Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, Semi-finalist (1994).
  • Littleton-Griswold Research Grant in Legal History, American Historical Association (1993).
  • Andrew W. Mellon Research Fellowship, Virginia Historical Society (2005, 1993).
  • Archie K. Davis Research Fellowship, North Caroliniana Society (1993).
  • Louis Bevier Graduate Fellowship, Rutgers University (1993-1994).

Recent or current undergraduate courses:

  • HIS 356 American Legal History
  • HIS 103A Founding of America
  • HIS 480R U.S. Social History: Racial Violence in Slavery and Freedom
  • HIS  253   Civil War and Reconstruction
  • HIS 480H Race and Sex in America

Recent or current graduate courses:

  • HIS 512 Civil War and Reconstruction
  • HIS 513 Readings in U.S. Women's History