Office: COPH 103A | Phone: (308) 865-8772 | Email: vaningenl1@unk.edu
20th Century United States, Civil Rights, Cold War, Immigration, Women’s History
Dr. Linda Van Ingen is professor and chair of the Department of History. She teaches 20th Century US social and political history, as well as Women's History, Civil Rights, and Immigration history. She joined the faculty at UNK in 2001 after earning her Ph.D. in History from the University of California-Riverside in 2000. She previously taught as a Visiting Faculty Fellow at California State University-San Marcos, as an Adjunct Professor at the University of Redlands in California, and as a Visiting Lecturer at the University of California-Riverside. She earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Iowa, Iowa City in 1984. In addition to the Midwest and Great Plains states, she has lived in California and Massachusetts as well as internationally in Port Elizabeth and Johannesburg, South Africa, and Casablanca, Morocco. She has traveled widely, including many visits to the Netherlands and a semester in England as an undergraduate. She encourages students to pursue international opportunities and has led short study abroad trips, most recently to Amsterdam, Paris, and London. Let her know if you are interested in organizing one of these tours that bring history to life!
HIST 126, Leadership in a Complex World Dr. Van Ingen focuses her teaching and research on modern US political and social history with a special interest in issues of gender, race, and class. Her research publications contribute to the historiography of women in politics with studies of women candidates’ early twentieth-century campaigns in California and the gendered politics of power. She has also researched the rise of women’s late nineteenth-century independence, applying a class analysis to the financial challenges single women teachers faced as they aged. Current research applies an international lens to the gendered politics of the Cold War era, exploring the rise of Americans living overseas in what Life and Time Magazine magnate Henry Luce and Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce called the “American Century.” Dr. Van Ingen mentors undergraduate and graduate student research projects on twentieth-century US political and social history, including women’s history, civil rights, and immigration history.
Work in Progress:
“Living Overseas: Americans Abroad in the Cold War Era, 1950s-1970s.”
“Nebraska’s Bicameral Women Legislators: A Look at the State’s First Four, 1922-1938”
Book:
Articles:
Van Ingen, Linda. “‘I Do Not Mean to Frown on Everything the Men Propose’: California’s First Assemblywomen in the Forty-Third Session of the Legislature, 1919,” California History (November 2020), 1-26.
