Academic History
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Ph.D. in History expected May 2023
California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) M.A. in History B.A. in English
Academic Focus
Marissa Jenrich (she, her) is a scholar of early American race, gender, sexuality, and carcerality. Marissa is interested in the varied systems of caging that emerged in the nation’s early history. Her dissertation, “‘She Never Did Like Her Mistress’” explores the complicity of ordinary white women in the long-standing and violent processes of enslavement, indenture, and incarceration that targeted communities of color in the nineteenth-century North. Her next work examines the intersection of motherhood, captivity, and discipline in the burgeoning nation’s many maternity homes, lying-in hospitals, and Magdalen Asylums. Marissa’s writing has appeared in the Journal of Urban History and the Journal of African American History. Her chapter on the 1741 Slave Conspiracy has been accepted in an edited volume, and she also has in-progress article on the participation and later prosecution of white female rioters in the 1863 Draft Riots.
Courses Taught
HIST 070A SC - United States History to 1865
HIST 050A AF - African Diaspora in the United States to 1877
Work
Article “Co-opting Respectability: African American Women and Economic Redress in New York City, 1860-1910.” Co-authored with Dr. Jane Dabel. Journal of Urban History (November 2015): 1-20.
Chapter in Edited Volume “A Crime ‘One Would Scarce Believe Any Man Capable of Committing’: the 1741 Slave Conspiracy and the Challenge to White Patriarchal Authority in Colonial New York.” The Red Letter Year of 1619, eds. Brenda Stevenson and Sharla Fett (accepted, publication forthcoming).
Dissertation “‘She Never Did Like Her Mistress’: White Women and Black Unfreedom in the Empire City, 1799-1894”