Tina Irvine
Assistant Professor
// History
Faculty
Assistant Professor // Critical Disability Studies // SIS
Assistant Professor
// Cornerstone
Faculty
Research focus:
Modern U.S. History
Office and Contact
Room: BRNG 6171
Office hours:
- Spring 2024:
- Monday & Wednesday, 12-2pm
Email: tirvine@purdue.edu
Phone: 62482
Tina Irvine is a cultural and intellectual historian of the modern United States with a particular interest in the politics of race, science, and power in the long twentieth century. In addition to her teaching and research specialties in the intellectual and cultural history of eugenics, social engineering, genomics, evolutionary thought, and bioengineering, she enjoys teaching classes on modern American political and cultural history, southern history, sexuality and gender, and race and race making.
Before coming to Purdue, Irvine worked at Indiana University in a variety of roles; as Visiting Lecturer at the Kelley School of Business, as Visiting Assistant Professor of History, and as Assistant Editor of the Journal of American History. During the 2022-2023 academic term, she was affiliated with IU’s Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society (CRRES) as a 2022 American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellow.
She is currently at work on two book-length projects. The first, Americanizing Appalachia: Mountain Reform and the Pursuit of a White American Identity, 1890-1933, examines a variety of social engineering projects targeted at “Americanizing” poor white Appalachians at the turn of the century. This work explains why early-twentieth-century educators, public health officials, social reformers, white supremacists, and eugenicists came to see the reform of Appalachian mountaineers as a critical ballast in preserving the nation’s racial hierarchy.
The second manuscript, tentatively titled From Eugenics to Genomics: The Politics of Race, Science, and Power in the Long Twentieth Century, bridges the Humanities-Science divide by historicizing the field of genomics. Taking the story of Appalachian biological and social engineering forward and expanding that inquiry to the rest of the country, it considers how these ideas played out from the 1920s to the present. With special attention to the way the law has been used to advance or passively allow such efforts– and critically aware of the racism, classism, and ableism pervading twentieth-century American society and politics– it shows how genetics, genomics, bioengineering, and their antecedents have shaped modern American ideas about race, reproduction, ability and disability, and human worth.
Publications
- “Reconciling Eugenics and Democracy: Alice Lloyd and the Rehabilitation of the Kentucky Mountaineer,” Journal of Southern History https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2023.a909847 November 2023.
- “Climate Change Just Erased the Past in Kentucky. Where Will it Happen Next?” History News Network https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/183619 August 7, 2022.
- “How Come We Never Learned This in High School?” Teaching the History of American Eugenics to College Students, H-Eugenics, https://networks.h-net.org/node/5296/blog/teaching-and-eugenics/8059822/teaching-blog-5-%E2%80%9Chow-come-we-never-learned-high August 12, 2021.
Tina Irvine is currently accepting graduate students interested in studying the cultural, intellectual, or social history of race, science, and gender in the long 20th century.