Caitlin Wiesner
- Assistant Professor, History, History Program Director
- School of Liberal Arts
- Maher Hall Room 205
- cwiesner@mercy.edu
- (914) 888-5134
- View My Scholar Website
Dr. Wiesner is an Assistant Professor of History who specializes in the history of gender, sexuality, race and crime control policy in the 20th century United States. She holds the William F. Olson Chair in Civic and Culture Studies for the 2023-2024 Academic Year.
When she is not teaching or researching, Dr. Wiesner enjoys cooking (and eating) new foods and exploring the natural and historic wonders of her native New Jersey.
Ph.D., Rutgers University (2021)
B.A., The College of New Jersey (2015)
Dr. Wiesner's research focuses on gender violence, feminist activism, African American women, and state policy in the late 20th century United States. She is currently completing her first book manuscript, Between the Street and the State: Black Women's Anti-Rape Activism Amid the War on Crime, to be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in Fall 2025. This book examines how Black anti-rape organizers critically engaged both the feminist movement against sexual violence and the federal War on Crime between 1974 and 1994. In Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., the Bay Area, Chicago, and Atlanta, activists inflected Black women’s longstanding tradition of community-based caring labor with the Black feminist condemnation of patriarchal and state violence. Their multifaceted and adaptable brand of anti-rape advocacy was premised on sustaining the survival of Black women and girls individually and Black communities more broadly, and countered the growing emphasis within the feminist anti-rape movement on controlling rape through carceral collaborations. They acted subversively, redirecting state funds and state-funded research premised on rape control to projects that offered care to Black victims. In the venues of public education, social welfare, and public health, they instituted preventative education and emotional healing as modes of justice. At times, they outspokenly resisted carceral legislation that displaced their caring labor with punitive programs of rape control.
Dr. Wiesner teaches a variety of courses within the History Program, including surveys of United States and African American History; upper-division courses on history of race, gender, and sexuality in the United States; and seminars on historical research methods.
Courses Taught:
First Year Seminar (Fall 2024)
American History Since 1877 (Fall 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024; Spring 2023 and 2024)
Global History of Sexuality (Spring 2024; Spring 2025)
Introduction to Research Methods (Spring 2022; Fall 2022)
African American History Since Reconstruction (Spring 2022; Fall 2023)
Gendering U.S. History (Fall 2024)
America’s Prison Nation (Spring 2023)
World War II in America (Spring 2022 and 2025)
The Family in America (Fall 2023)
History of the United States Since 1941 (Spring 2024)
Senior Seminar in History (Spring 2023)
Books
Between the Street and the State: Black Women’s Anti-Rape Activism Amid the War on Crime, forthcoming with the University of Pennsylvania Press for the Politics and Culture in Modern America Series Fall 2025.
Journal Articles
“The War on Crime and the War on Rape: The LEAA and Philadelphia WOAR, 1974-1984," Modern American History 7, no. 1 (March 2024): 24 - 45
“‘The first thing we cry about is violence’: The National Black Women’s Health Project and the Fight Against Rape and Battering,” Journal of Women’s History 34, no. 1 (Spring 2022): 71-92.
Book Chapters
“When the War on Rape Met the War on Crime: A Black Women’s Perspective,” forthcoming in The Nursing Clio Reader, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2025.
“In the Shadow of Old Queens: African American Life and Labors in New Brunswick from the End of Slavery to the Industrial Era” in Scarlet and Black: Slavery and Dispossession in Rutgers History, Volume II, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2020.
““An’ I A Poor Slave Yet”: The Precarity of Black Life in New Brunswick, 1766-1835” in Scarlet and Black: Slavery and Dispossession in Rutgers History, Volume I,New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2016.
Book Reviews
Review of The Feminist War on Crime: The Unexpected Role of Women’s Liberation in Mass Incarceration by Aya Gruber, Feminist Formations 33, no. 1 (Spring 2021): 279-282.
Dr. Wiesner's research has been supported by the Graduate School of New Brunswick, the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, Rutgers Oral History Archives, Smith College Libraries, the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, the New-York Historical Society, the P.E.O. International, the Warren and Beatrice Susman Endowment, and the Coordinating Council for Women's History.