Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Faculty

Marta Vicente

The contact information for Prof. Marta Vicente is as follows: Marta Vicente 213 G Bailey Hall 864-2235 mvicente@ku.edu

Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and History (Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University, 1998). Faculty member at the University of Kansas since 1997.

Research Area - women’s history in eighteenth-century Spain.

Teaching Area - European women’s history from 1600's to the present, feminist theory and women and work, and women and sexuality in the early modern world.

I have been working on women’s history ever since I started my senior thesis a the University of Barcelona in 1988, which was about “Women in Early-Modern Guilds in Barcelona.” A publication in English came out of this thesis, titled “Images and Realities of Work: Women and Guilds in Early Modern Barcelona.” My doctoral dissertation was about artisan families and early industrialization in eighteenth-century Barcelona. I am currently writing a book entitled “Clothing the Spanish Empire: Families and the Calico Trade in the Atlantic World, 1700-1815.”

Other research projects include the history of the relations between notions of women and work in the Spanish Enlightenment and the actual experience of ordinary women. I will analyze a variety of archival documentation from court suits to business letters that reveal how women constructed their public identity and whether such construction had any relation to the political, intellectual and cultural changes that Spanish society witnessed at the end of the eighteenth century.

I have taught the following courses on women’s studies: “History of Women and the Family in Europe: From 1600 to Present”; “History of Feminist Theory”; “History of Women and Work”; and “History of Women and the Body.”

Recent Book Published

Description: By the 1780s in the city of Barcelona alone, more than 150 factories shipped calicoes to every major city in Spain and across the Atlantic, from Veracruz to Montevideo. Catalan, Basque and Castilian families sent relatives throughout the Iberian Peninsula and Spanish America, hoping to enrich themselves from the trade in calicoes. Clothing the Spanish Empire narrates the lives of families on both sides of the Atlantic who profited from the craze for calicoes, and in doing so helped the Spanish empire to flourish in the eighteenth century. Go here for more information.

Recent Articles

• “Successful Mystics and Failed Mystics: Teaching St. Teresa in the Women’s Studies Classroom,” in Approaches to Teaching: Teresa of Avila and the Spanish Mystics ed. Alison Weber (New York: Modern Language Association, forthcoming 2007)
• “Crafting the Industrial Revolution: Artisan Families and the Calico Industry in Eighteenth-Century Spain,” in Reconceptualizing the Industrial Revolution eds. Jeff Horn and Len Rosenband (MIT Press, forthcoming 2007)