Mara Keire

I am interested in the cultural, intellectual, and legal history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in the United States. My previous scholarship focused on red-light districts, vice reform, and the development of the new commercial popular culture in the early twentieth century. I am currently working on two projects:  Under the Boardwalk: Rape and Popular Culture in New York, 1900-1929 and Feminists on Sexual Violence From the Second Wave to #MeToo.

Selected Publications

  • 'Class, Commodity, Consumption: Theorizing Sexual Violence during the Feminist Sex Wars,' in Christopher Phelps and Robin Vandome, eds., Marxism and America: New Appraisals, Manchester University Press (2021).
  • 'Women and Sexual Assault in the United States, 1900-1940,' Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History (2019).
  • 'Swearing Allegiance: Street Language, US War Propaganda, and the Declining Status of Women in Northeastern Nightlife, 1900-1920,' The Journal of the History of Sexuality  25.2 (2016): 246-266
  • For Business and Pleasure: Red-Light Districts and the Regulation of Vice in the United States, 1890-1933, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. (New Yorker review)
  • 'The Vice Trust: A Reinterpretation of the White Slavery Scare in the United States, 1907 - 1917,' Journal of Social History, 35.1 (Autumn 2001), 5-41.
  • 'Dope Fiends and Degenerates: The Gendering of Addiction in the Early Twentieth Century,' Journal of Social History, 31.4 (Summer 1998), 809-822
  • 'The Committee of Fourteen and Saloon Reform in New York City, 1905 - 1920,' Business and Economic History, 26.2 (Winter 1998), 573-583