I am a historian of gender, sexuality, and family in the twentieth-century United States. I have been teaching at the University of Memphis since 2008. I received a PhD in history from the University of Chicago in 2008  and a BA in history from Columbia University in 1999.

My research focuses on the politics of marriage and family. My first book, Everybody Else: Adoption and the Politics of Domestic Diversity in Postwar America (University of Georgia Press, 2014), uses adoption as a lens into how diverse men and women thought about marriage and parenthood during the post-World War II baby boom. In the book, I analyze the adoption applications of diverse couples — African American and white, working- and middle-class — who wanted to adopt children. These men and women were forced to explain what many never had to: why they wanted to become parents and how they believed a child would add to their family. Applicants described their families as essential to their sense of purpose and meaning in their everyday lives, but they also depicted them as sites where they felt acutely both the comforts of privilege and the stings of inequality. I suggest that, although we usually think of the baby boom family as an apolitical retreat from Cold War anxieties, instead it was intimately connected in the minds of ordinary people to larger political questions about race, gender, and economic inequality. Please click on the Publications tab for more information or to purchase the book.

I am currently working on a several new projects, including an oral history project on reproductive justice and a research project on adultery.

I live in Memphis, TN, with my husband and daughter.

Download my CV here: PotterCVcurrent