Professor and Chair
Ph.D., University of Wisconsin, Madison (1971)
Modern Germany; Gender History; Agricultural and Environmental History


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Office: 4301 Friedmann Hall
E-mail: marion.gray@wmich.edu
Phone: (269) 387-4650
Webpage: http://homepages.wmich.edu/~mgray/

Teaching

Although my current administrative responsibilities restrict my time in the classroom, helping students improve their skills of historical analysis is one of my greatest priorities. I teach a variety of courses in European history, including Western Civilization at the introductory level. I also teach courses dealing with gender history, the social and political history of modern Germany, agricultural history, global environmental history. At the graduate level, my teaching focuses often on gender, environment, and rural life. Chronologically, my graduate courses emphasize the age of the Enlightenment and Revolution, ca. 1750-1850, in German-speaking Europe, although I mentor graduate students in other periods and contexts of modern European history.

Scholarship

My research focuses on the important transitional era spanning the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century. This period of the “Enlightenment” and of the French Revolution brought profound changes in the fabric of society of German-speaking Europe. My work analyzes these changes from the perspectives of government, law, agriculture, environment, and gender. I am especially interested in the ways in which the creation of a modern market economy and scientific agriculture changed the lives of ordinary women and men. I am currently researching the local history of a village, Schlalach in Brandenburg. I am interested in the way in which modern notions of individualism and private property transformed the farmers’ relationship with the land.

Recent Publications

Gender in Transition: Discourse and Practice in German-Speaking Europe, 1750-1830. Co-edited with Ulrike Gleixner. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006.
(See http://www.press.umich.edu)

Productive Men and Reproductive Women: The Agrarian Household and the Emergence of Separate Spheres during the German Enlightenment. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2000. (See http://www.berghahnbooks.com)

“Ökologie, Gesellung und Herrschaft im königlichen Vorwerksdorf Schlalach in den 1760er Jahren”  in Ländliche Ökonomien: Arbeit und Gesellung in der frühneuzeitlichen Agrargesellschaft, Silke Lesemann and Axel Lubinski, eds. 125-148. Aufklärung und Europa: Schriftenreihe des Forshungszentrums Europäische Aufklärung; e.V. Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2007. (See http://bwv-verlag.de/shop/bwv/index.php?page=detail&match=LISA_NR2=1375)

“Microhistory as Universal History” (review article) Central European History 34 (2001) 419-431.

“Men as Citizens and Women as Wives: The Enlightenment Codification of Law and the Establishment of Separate Spheres,” in Reich oder Nation? Mitteleuropa 1780-1815, ed. Heinz Duchhardt and Andreas Kunz. Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Europäische Geschichte Mainz, Abteilung Universalgeschichte, Beiheft 46. Mainz: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1998.

“Kameralismus: Die säkuläre Ökonomie und die getrennten Geschlechtersphären,” Werkstatt Geschichte 19 (1998) 41-58.