Michelle Nickerson

ÎçÒ¹AV

Michelle Nickerson is a Professor of History at ÎçÒ¹AV. She teaches courses on the history of women and gender, U.S. politics, social movements, cities and suburbs, and American religion. 

In 2012 she published  (Princeton University Press),which documents the grassroots activism of conservative women in Cold War Los Angeles and explores the impact of that activism on the emerging American right.  She also co-authored a volume of essays called (University of Pennsylvania Press).  Nickerson is currently currently finishing her latest book on the history of religion and politics in the long 1960s called, “Spiritual Radicals:  How the Camden 28 put the Vietnam War on trial, which will be published by the University of Chicago Press.

Follow Dr. Nickerson on Twitter: . For more information about her work, visit .

Research Interests

U.S. Women’s and Gender History, 20th Century Political and Urban History, American Conservatism

Courses Taught

• HIST 211: U.S. History to 1865
• HIST 212: U.S. History since 1865
• HIST 300: Women in 20^th Century America
• HIST 381: Rebels and Reformers in American History
• HIST 394: The 1960s
• HIST 442: U.S. Women’s and Gender History
• HIST 460: U.S. Urban Social and Cultural History
• HIST 561: Seminar: Women's and Gender History

Selected Publications

  (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012)

  (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, co-editor, 2011)

"Goldwater's 'Moral Mothers?: Miscalculations of Gender in the 1964 Republican Presidential Campaign," Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, ed.  Goldwater Reconsidered: The Senator's Life, Politics, and Influence (Tempe: University of Arizona Press, 2013).

"Politically Desperate Housewives: Women and Conservatism in Postwar Los Angeles,” California History 86:3 (June 2009), 4-21.