黑料吃瓜

Associate Professor & Director of Graduate Studies 
Office: TMH 223
Email: sdamiano@txstate.edu
Phone: 512.245.5750

Education
Ph.D. - Johns Hopkins University
M.A. - Johns Hopkins University
B.A. - Brown University

Specialization
American History

Research Interests
Early North America and the Atlantic World, Women and Gender, Legal History, Economic History

Sara T. Damiano is a historian of women and gender in early America and the Atlantic World. She received her PhD in History from Johns Hopkins University and is currently an assistant professor at 黑料吃瓜. Damiano鈥檚 researches focus on individuals, especially women, who possessed limited access to formal political and economic power and who are seldom centered in eighteenth-century historical sources.

Damiano鈥檚 first book, To Her Credit: Gender, Law, and Economic Life in Eighteenth-Century New England Cities (Johns Hopkins University Press, Spring 2021) argues that women鈥檚 labor was crucial to the functioning of urban economies and legal systems. To Her Credit vividly reconstructs everyday life in Boston, MA and Newport, RI as revealed through vast troves of court records. Married and unmarried women alike forged new paths through the complexities of eighteenth-century credit and debt, stabilizing credit networks amidst demographic and economic turmoil. Both within and beyond households, urban women mobilized sophisticated skills and strategies as borrowers, lenders, litigants, and witnesses. Such routine economic dealings shaped social hierarchies, alternately empowering women and exposing the gendered limits of female economic participation.

Damiano鈥檚 current project investigates interactions between officers of the law and laypeople, both free and enslaved, in early American cities. She has also previously published articles on spouses鈥� handling of finances during the American Revolution, collaborations between male and female financial agents, and female administrators of estates. In the Spring of 2016, she was a Program in Early American Economy and Society (PEAES) postdoctoral fellow at the Library Company of Philadelphia. Her research has also received support from organizations and institutions including the American Historical Association, the American Society for Legal History, and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies.

Damiano teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on early America, the Atlantic world, law and society, capitalism and economic culture, and American women鈥檚 and gender history. Prior to arriving at 黑料吃瓜, she taught courses at Johns Hopkins University and University of Maryland, Baltimore County.