Short Bio

Dawn Flood is an Associate Professor of History at Campion College at the University of Regina, where she has taught since 2005. Her doctoral degree is in U.S. History with an emphasis on gender, legal, and medical history, and the history of sexuality. Her research involves courtroom strategies used to prosecute and defend against accusations of sexual violence, which has led to further research interests in the history of violence more broadly, as depicted in popular media.

Research

A current research project consider the role of black power ideologies in the modern U.S. civil rights movement during the 1960s/1970s, especially the role of the Black Panther Party’s Chicago Chapter and its dynamic leader, Fred Hampton, in challenging institutionalized racism. This research interest stems from a consideration of the nature of urban machine politics and the Chicago Police Department, notable for its widespread violence against and repression of the city’s residents on the margins.  Further research interests involve the history of sexual violence as depicted in tabloid journalism and other forms of popular media during and after the era of modern (second-wave) feminism in the United States.  As feminists organized around protesting and preventing rape, sexual violence remained a trope used to expose the anxieties of modern society and to contain what critics believed to be the moral failings of (newly) “sexually liberated” women who challenged the status quo.

Courses Taught

HIST 114: Issues in the History of the Americas – the Transatlantic Slave Trade
HIST 234: The History of the United States, 1865-1941
HIST 235: The History of the United States, 1941-present
HIST 333: The History of Chicago, America’s Second City
HIST 334: Gender in Modern America, 1865-present
HIST 432/832: Black Power in U.S. History
HIST 434/834: American Trials of the Twentieth Century

Recent Publications

Rape in Chicago: Race, Myth, and the Courts (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012)

“Stormy Protests on Sex Crimes: Race and Rape in Postwar Chicagoland,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society vol. 102, nos. 3-4 (Fall/Winter, 2009)