Ph.D., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1998
Email: emily@emilybingham.net
Website: http://emilybingham.net
What do we want from history? A reassuring narrative of triumph? A guide to the future? Something complex that, acknowledging the limits of knowability, binds the present and past into a web where we can find connection and understanding across time and space and identities? Born in Louisville, Dr. Bingham holds a B.A. from Harvard University and earned her Ph.D. at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Tying together her work is the effort to see the impact of ideas in United States history and society on real (non-famous) people and social structures. She has written and taught about conservative southern regionalism, Enlightenment liberalism, gender and labor, the purpose and meaning of childhood, sexuality, and an 1850s blackface minstrel song that is with us still. People are wired to connect to stories, and Bingham uses biography and cultural history to follow ideas through human decisions and identities, just as they course through each of us. Dr. Bingham’s first teaching job in Louisville was at Bellarmine College in 1998; she has also taught at Centre College, University of Louisville, and St. Francis High School. She is excited to offer honors seminars and guide thesis projects and otherwise support Bellarmine undergraduates. When not in researching in the archives or writing books, she is biking in the parks, walking in the woods, dreaming of Italy and Italian food, and enjoying time with her husband and three children.
Select Publications and Presentations
- My Old Kentucky Home: The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic American Song, Alfred. A. Knopf, 2022.
- “Forget About It: Slavery in Stephen Foster’s ‘My Old Kentucky Home, Goodnight!” Memory Studies Association, Charlottesville, VA, June 18-21, 2020.
- “’Let’s Buy It!’: Tourism, Race, and Marketing Early Twentieth-Century Kentucky,” Ohio Valley History 19 (Fall 2019): 27-56.
- “A Race about Race” Louisville Magazine, May 2019
- “’Old Kentucky Home—Let’s Buy It!’ Nostalgia and Tourism as Economic Development in Jim Crow Kentucky,” Southern Historical Association, Louisville, KY, November 9, 2019
- “Can We Talk About Stephen Foster?” Irish Arts Center, New York, September 27, 2018
- Irrepressible: Henrietta Bingham’s Jazz-Age Life, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.
- “Nobody’s Bizness if I Do: Henrietta Bingham: Jazz Hound, Bloomsbury Muse, and Queer Culture Vixen,” Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art, January 24, 2016
- “Kentucky in Bloomsbury:Henrietta Bingham, Black Culture, and the Southern Gothic in Jazz-Age London,” Varieties of Southern Religious History Regina Sullivan and Monte Hampton, eds., University of South Carolina Press, 2015.
- “Kentucky in Bloomsbury: Henrietta Bingham and the 1920s,” Eighth Conference on Southern Women’s History, Southern Association of Women’s Historians, Columbia, SC, June 6, 2009.
- “American, Jewish, Southern, Mordecai: Constructing Identities to 1865,” in Jewish Roots in Southern Soil: A New History, edited by Marcie Ferris and Mark Greenberg, University Press of New England, 2006.
- “Thou knowest not what a day may bring forth:Intellect, Power, Conversion, and Apostasy in the Life of Rachel Mordecai Lazarus (1788-1838),” in Rethinking Religion in the American South, edited by Donald G. Mathews and Beth Barton Schweiger, University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
- Mordecai: An Early American Family, Hill and Wang, 2003.
- “The Female Academy and Beyond: Three Mordecai Sisters at Work in the Old South,” in Neither Lady, Nor Slave: Working Women in the Old South, edited by Susanna Delfino and Michele Gillespie, University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
- The Southern Agrarians and the New Deal: Essays After I’ll Take My Stand, ed. with Thomas Underwood, University Press of Virginia, 2001.