Education

Ph.D., University of California, Irvine, 2007

Academic & Professional Interests

Professor Thigpen is a Nineteenth Century U.S. historian whose work focuses on women and gender, the U.S West, and Colonialism.

Awards and Fellowships

Center for Arts and Humanities Fellowship, Washington State University (2020)
James H. Bradley Fellowship, Montana Historical Society (2020)
Western History Association’s Jensen-Miller Award for best  article in the field of women and gender in the North American West (2011)
Lerner-Scott Dissertation Prize Finalist (2008)
Chancellor’s Club Dissertation Fellowship(2006)
Mayers Fellowship, The Huntington Library (2005)

Publications

H-Diplo Roundtable on Island Queens and Mission Wives: How Gender and Empire Remade Hawai‘i’s Pacific World (Spring, 2016).

“Converting Hawai‘i: Race, Gender, and the Hawaiian Islands Mission.” In Oxford Handbook of Religion and Race in American History, edited by Kathryn Gin Lum and Paul Harvey. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.  

Island Queens and Mission Wives: How Gender and Empire Remade Hawai‘i’s Pacific World. University of North Carolina Press, Gender and American Culture Series (2014).

“Desperately Seeking Mary: Materializing Mary Richardson Walker, Missionary,” The Public Historian Vol. 34, No. 3 (Fall 2012): 68-81.

“‘You Have Been Very Thoughtful Today’: The Significance of Gratitude and Reciprocity in Missionary-Hawaiian Gift Exchange” Pacific Historical Review (2010).

” ‘Something Wonderful is About to Happen’: Americans and the Open Frontier” ABC-CLIO’s Analyze Project (August 2008).

“Looking ‘West’–Perspectives on a Changing Nation, HOT Themes in American History Humanities Out There, UCI California History-Social Science Project and the Santa Ana Partnership (2007).