Tina Irvine
- Assistant Professor // History
- Assistant Professor // Cornerstone
- Affiliated Faculty // Critical Disability Studies // SIS
Research Focus
• 20th century United States; Cultural and Social History; History of Ideas
Office and Contact
Tina Irvine received her BA from DePauw University and PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. She is a cultural and intellectual historian of the modern United States with special interests in the politics of race, science, and power in the long twentieth century. She researches and teaches in the areas of American eugenics, social engineering, modern American political and cultural history, and southern history.
Before coming to Purdue, Irvine worked at Indiana University in a variety of roles; as Visiting Lecturer at the Kelley School of Business, as Visiting Assistant Professor of History, and as Assistant Editor of the Journal of American History. During the 2022-2023 academic term, she was affiliated with IU’s Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society (CRRES) as a 2022 American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellow.
She is currently at work on two book-length projects. The first, Americanizing Appalachia: Mountain Workers, Regional Exceptionalism, and the Making of American Identity, 1890-1933 is under advance contract with the University of Chicago Press. Weaving together cultural, intellectual, and scientific history, it explains not just how but why reformers placed southern Appalachia in their crosshairs at the turn of the century. It shows that the region became the epicenter of turn-of-the-century debates about America’s biological and cultural past, and its modern economic, social, and political future. Analyzing mountain reform as an overlooked component of the Americanization movement and as a response to concerns about a weakened color line in the Jim Crow South and increasingly immigrant-heavy North, it places reformers’ view of mountaineers’ social and cultural reform in the period’s larger effort to create a homogeneous Protestant American culture rooted in mountaineers’ allegedly Anglo-Saxon folk traditions and values.
The second manuscript is tentatively titled From Eugenics to Genomics: The Politics of Race, Science, and Power in the Twentieth-Century United States. This book is interested in the diffuse ways eugenic rationalities became embedded in public health administration, educational tracking systems, guidance counseling programs, immigration enforcement, insurance companies, disability governance, and carceral institutions throughout the twentieth century. By analyzing more hidden forms of eugenic reasoning (those outside the obvious medical and genetics contexts), this book shows how eugenic thought evolved from its heyday in the 1910s and 1920s to a more subtle reform eugenics in the post-WWII period.
Recent Publications
- “Reconciling Eugenics and Democracy: Alice Lloyd and the Rehabilitation of the Kentucky Mountaineer,” Journal of Southern History https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2023.a909847 November 2023.
Courses
HIST 152: U.S. History Since 1877
HIST 308: American Eugenics
HIST 610: History and Historical Methods
Dr. Irvine is currently accepting graduate students interested in studying twentieth century American cultural or intellectual history, with special attention to the South, rural America, social planning and community development, and the interplay between science and society.