Biography

Dr. Prescott's work focuses on gender in the American West. She combines social history and material culture methods to study the intersections of gender, race, social class, and historical memory. Her first book, Gender and Generation on the Far Western Frontier (University of Arizona, 2007), traced changing gender roles and ideology among early white settlers in Oregon between 1845 and 1900. Her latest book, Pioneer Mother Monuments: Constructing Cultural Memory (University of Oklahoma Press, 2019) won the 2020 Gita Chaudhuri Prize. In it, she traces changing portrayals of race, gender and national identity in pioneer monuments erected from 1890 to the present.  She is also building a companion website for this book, Pioneer Monuments in the American West, that features interactive maps and timelines, and provides images and information about the 200 monuments included in her study. Supported by a Whiting Foundation Public Engagement Seed Grant, she is using the GIS-enabled app Clio to create detailed historical entries and walking tours of 200 sites in the West, with an emphasis on controversial public monuments and shifting representations of race and gender. Prescott is also interested in quilting, particularly examining quilts as a reflection of women's work roles and social class status.

A member of the History Department since 2007, Dr. Prescott serves as the Director of Undergraduate Studies in History. She teaches several courses that are closely related to her research interests, including American women and gender, the American West, cultural history, and material culture methodology, as well as the introductory United States Since 1877 survey course. She particularly enjoys utilizing Reacting to the Past (RTTP) intensive role-playing games to train students to think, speak and write critically about the past. These RTTP games feature prominently in her two newest courses, “Slaves, Citizens and Social Change” and "Monuments, Museums and Memory." Prescott is drawing on her ongoing research to develop a new RTTP game centered on debates about whether to preserve, relocate, or remove San Francisco's controversial Pioneer Monument. While her academic training is in social history, she has also worked in several areas of public history: museum curatorship, collections management, archival and rare book cataloging, and historic preservation. She is also active in UND's Women & Gender Studies program and is the faculty adviser for the History Club, the UND chapters of Phi Alpha Theta history honor society chapter and InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. Beyond UND, she is active in several international historical societies and serves as an Associate Fellow at the International Quilt Study Center in Lincoln, Nebraska.