Diane Miller Sommerville

Associate Professor
Ph.D.,1995, Rutgers University
19th-Century U.S., U.S. South, Women's History, Race, Sexuality
Office: LT 816
Phone: (607) 777-2251   E-mail: sommervi@binghamton.edu

Diane Sommerville's research interests encompass race, gender, and the American South. Her first research project, which culminated in the publication of her first book, Rape and Race in the Nineteenth-Century South, traces the evolution of white southerners' fears of black rape by examining actual cases of black-on-white rape throughout the nineteenth century. Her current project is a study of suicide among Southerners during and after the Civil War that explores how gender shaped decisions about suicide in the wake of war's physical and emotional devastation. Her teaching areas include the 19th-century U.S., the American South, U.S. Women's history, Civil War and Reconstruction, History of Sexuality in the U.S., and African-American History.

Current Project:

• ABERRATION OF MIND: SUICIDE, CIVIL WAR AND THE AMERICAN SOUTH

Publications:

• New York Times, Opinionator, DISUNION Civil War Blog, April 2, 2012
• "Will They Ever Be Able to Forget?'" Confederate Soldiers and Mental Illness in the Defeated South," in Weirding the War: Stories from the Civil War's Ragged Edges, ed. Stephen Berry (University of Georgia Press, 2011): 321-339.
  
• Rape and Race in the Nineteenth-Century South (University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
• “Moonlight, Magnolias, and Brigadoon, or “Almost Like Being In Love”: Mastery and Sexual Exploitation in Eugene Genovese's Plantation South.” Radical History Review (Winter 2004).
• "'I was very much wounded': Rape Law, Children, and the Antebellum South," in Sex Without Consent: Rape and Sexual Coercion in America, ed. Merril Smith (New York University Press, February 2002).
• “Rape, Race and Castration in Slave Law in the Colonial and Early South,” in The Devil's Lane: Sex and Race in the Early South, eds. Catherine Clinton and Michele Gillespie (Oxford University Press, 1997).
• “The Rape Myth in the Old South Reconsidered,” Journal of Southern History (August 1995). Reprinted in Myths America (Brandywine Press, 1997) and in A Question of Manhood: A Reader in U.S. Black Men's History and Masculinity, edited by Darlene Clark Hine and Earnestine Jenkins (Indiana University Press, 2001).