PEOPLE

(back to Alphabetical Faculty Index)

Tamara Plakins Thornton, Professor
office: 568 Park Hall
email: thornton@acsu.buffalo.edu
phone: (716) 645-2181 ext. 568

Education: A.B., Harvard, 1978; Ph.D., Yale, 1987

Courses Regularly Taught:
HIS 161: U.S. to 1877
HIS 216: Crime and Punishment in America
HIS 361/62: American Cultural and Intellectual History I and II
HIS 537: Readings in American Cultural History
HIS 551: Intellectual Life in America
HIS 576: American History Core I

Field(s): American

Hub(s): Knowledge; Culture and Society

Research Interests: American cultural and intellectual history; early republic and antebellum America; the structure of American intellectual life; American elites; history of reading and writing

Current Research: I am currently working on a biography of Nathaniel Bowditch (1773-1838), prominent in scientific, business, and social circles in Salem and Boston.

Selected Publications:
Cultivating Gentlemen: The Meaning of Country Life among the Boston Elite, 1785-1860 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989)

Handwriting in America: A Cultural History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996)

"Deviance, Dominance and the Construction of Handedness in Turn-of-the-Century Anglo-America," in Moral Problems in American Life, Karen Halttunen and Lewis Perry, eds., (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999).

Awards:
Whiting Foundation Fellowship (1985-86)

National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (1993-94)

Milton Plesur Excellence in Teaching Award, 2001

Last updated: Wednesday, November 5, 2003