Mary Lynn Pierce is currently an Adjunct Lecturer in Africana Studies Program, and History Department, at the University of Arizona, Tucson. She graduated with a Ph.D. in History (Early Modern and Modern Europe, and World History) at the University of Arizona. Her research focuses on early modern and modern England, British and French colonialism in Africa, and the Ottoman Empire. She is currently working on completing a monograph “Controversy in Seventeenth-Century English Coffeehouses: Transcultural Interactions with an Oriental Import.” In addition to writing reviews of books on religious and cultural practices in early modern Britain, she has also published several journal articles, including "Coffee made Cuckolds and Eunuchs: Emergence of an Ottoman Drink in 17th-Century English Society," Food Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal.
Pierce, Mary L
Lecturer
This course evaluates the experience of peoples of African descent in the United States after the Civil War. Reconstruction, "Jim Crow" segregation, "New Negro" Movement, Cold War, Civil Rights Movement, and the "Great Society" are the main subjects addressed in this class.
Students will gain insight into the historical and cultural factors that have created, and continue to perpetuate gender and ethnic inequity. Students will come to understand African American writers, particularly women, as historical agents and self-defined individuals. While the course will emphasize the multiple roles of African American women, as portrayed autobiographically it also incorporates the historical struggles of those around them. It is my goal that through the course material students will see how African Americans are constantly recreating themselves in the face of adversity.