Susan Lee Johnson will discuss the intellectual and political contexts in which Roaring Camp took shape, including the emergence of gender studies, the persistence of ethnic studies, and the turn of the historical discipline toward linguistic concerns.

Susan Lee Johnson is Associate Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her book, Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush, won a Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy and the W. Turrentine Jackson Award forthe best first book published on the American West. She is currently in residence as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Huntington Library.