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)  

Dr. Wiesner's research focuses on gender violence, feminist activism, African American women, and state policy in the late 20th century United States. Her debut monograph, Between the Street and the State: Black Women's Anti-Rape Activism Amid the War on Crime, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in September 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. 

The Organization of American Historians selected this book for the 2026 Liberty Legacy Foundation Award honoring the best book written by a historian about the civil rights struggle in the United States from the revolution to the present. Her research has appeared in the Journal of Women’s History, Modern American History, and the Nursing Clio Reader. She is the recipient of several awards in support of her research and teaching from the New-York Historical Society, the Coordinating Council for Women’s History, Smith College Libraries, the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. 

Books 

Between the Street and the State: Black Women’s Anti-Rape Activism Amid the War on Crime, Politics and Culture in Modern America Series, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 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. https://doi.org/10.1017/mah.2023.65

“‘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. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/jowh.2022.0001

Book Chapters 

“When the War on Rape Met the War on Crime: A Black Women’s Perspective” in The Nursing Clio Reader, edited by The Nursing Clio Editorial Collective, 230-234, 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.

Annotated Bibliographies 

“Sexual Assault in the United States and American Context,” in Gautham Rao (ed.), Oxford Bibliographies in Legal History (New York, NY, online edition, Oxford Academic, 25 June 2026). https://doi.org/10.1093/9780197859025.003.0017

Book Reviews 

Review of The Silver Women: How Black Women’s Labor Made the Panama Canal by Joan Flores-Villalobos, History: Reviews of New Books, (August 2026): 1–2.

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.

2026    

• Liberty Legacy Foundation Award for Between the Street and the State: Black Women’s Anti-Rape Advocacy Amid the War on Crime (2025), Organization of American Historians ($2,000) 

Co-Director for “Global Horizons: Reimagining and Reinvigorating the History Survey (AC-303415),” funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Humanities Initiatives at Hispanic-Serving Institutions ($147,610) 

2025    

Big Problems Seminar Fellow, Project COMPASS (Connecting Mercy Pathways and Student Success), Mercy University (funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Developing Hispanic-Serving Institutions Title V Program) ($4,000)

Faculty Teaching Excellence Award, Mercy University ($1,500)

2024    

First Year Seminar Fellow, Project COMPASS (Connecting Mercy Pathways and Student Success), Mercy University (funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Developing Hispanic-Serving Institutions Title V Program) ($3,000)

2023    

William F. Olson Chair in Civic and Cultural Studies, Mercy University ($5,000)

Instruction Enhancement Grant, Advisory Committee for Teaching and Learning, Office of the Provost, Mercy University ($1,000)

2022    

Research Support Grant, Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University ($2,000)

2020    

Ida B. Wells Graduate Student Fellowship, Coordinating Council for Women’s History (finalist)

2019    

Andrew W. Mellon Predoctoral Fellowship in Women’s History, New-York Historical Society

P.E.O. Scholar Award, P.E.O. Sisterhood International

John Whiteclay Chambers II Oral History Fellowship, Rutgers Oral History Archives

Madeleine L’Engle Research Fellowship, Smith College Libraries