Contact Information
Biography
Stephanie Gray, assistant professor of Public History, earned her B.A. in History from Mount Holyoke College and both M.A. in Public History and Ph.D. in U.S. History from the University of South Carolina. Stephanie specializes in public history, historic preservation, and twentieth century U.S. cultural history. At Duquesne, she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in both traditional and public history, which contribute to the Department's new Public History undergraduate certificate.
As a public historian, Stephanie has worked for the James A. Garfield National Historic Site (a National Park Service unit), the South Carolina State Historic Preservation Office, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation's Main Street America program. Her interest in old buildings and cultural landscapes inform her research and teaching on the built environment.
Education
M.A., Public History, University of South Carolina
B.A., History, Mount Holyoke College
Profile Information
- HIST-151: Shaping of the Modern World
- HIST-203: U.S. to 1877
- HIST-204: U.S. since 1877
- HIST/PHST-223: The Practice of Public History
- PHST-514: Commemoration and Preservation
- PHST-525: Introduction to Historic Preservation
- PHST-601: Introduction to Public History
- HIST-611: Emergence of the Modern U.S.
Stephanie's current book project, Restoring America: Historic Preservation and the New Deal, explores why people – with funding from the New Deal government – restored local and national historic landmarks during the Great Depression. Between 1935 and 1941 the Works Progress Administration (WPA) financed the restoration of what the federal agency labeled “historic shrines”; these projects pragmatically put Americans to work, but also intentionally and artistically celebrated the diverse and multicultural character of the nation's history. While these restorations operated within the context of the national cultural agenda to democratize art, local communities dictated what places mattered to them and truly shaped the contours of these preservation projects. Essentially, they were grassroots campaigns sponsored by a federal initiative. From a seventeenth-century stone house of a Puritan minister in New England, to a popular eighteenth-century theater in the Deep South, to famed aviator Charles Lindbergh's modest farmhouse and surrounding lands of the Upper Midwest, to a multi-layered Spanish-American arts district in the Central South, the four case studies examined reflect the textured nature of the nation’s historic built environment through which Americans chose to mediate modern changes.
“ʻRestoring’ Charleston’s Dock Street Theatre: Preservation and Power in the Depression-Era South,” The Public Historian 44, no. 3 (August 2022, forthcoming)
Book Review of Kate Dossett, Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020) in the Journal of African American History 107, no. 2 (Spring 2022) https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/718694
“Public Good And Private Profit, Historic Preservation In Early America – A Review of ‘Historic Real Estate,’” The Metropole (the official blog of the Urban History Association), April 2, 2022. https://themetropole.blog/2022/04/05/public-good-and-private-profit-historic-preservation-in-early-america-a-review-of-historic-real-estate/
“Cornell Arms,” National Register of Historic Places Nomination Form, Columbia, Richland County, January 2019, National Register #100003305. http://schpr.sc.gov/index.php/Detail/properties/53237.
“DeBruhl-Marshall House,” addendum to the National Register of Historic Places, Columbia, Richland County, South Carolina, Spring 2015, National Register #72001218. Co-author. http://schpr.sc.gov/index.php/Detail/properties/12792