Jessie Vander Heide received her Ph.D. in History from Lehigh University and specializes in the histories of gender and sexuality in nineteenth-century America. As a Hench Fellow, she will work on transforming her dissertation, “Schooling Intimacy: Love, Romance, and Sexuality at American Female Academies, 1780-1870,” into a book manuscript. The project explores the romantic and sexual relationships of early United States female academy students, as well as the prolific discourse surrounding girls’ and women’s same-sex intimacy. In the early republic, many young women were newly attending female academies, and adult reformers simultaneously produced a plethora of instructional writings concerning young women’s school relationships. “Schooling Intimacy” documents both the queer relationships that female academy students cultivated, as well as the instructions, warnings, and fears that many adults expressed in relation to students’ newfound same-sex attachments. Exploring a diverse array of sources, the project works to uncover queer archives and to unpack how young women experienced queer intimacy in the early United States.
Jessie’s work on this project has been generously supported by the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Special Collections Research Center of the College of William & Mary Libraries, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Lawrence Henry Gipson Institute for Eighteenth Century Studies. Her work has appeared in the Journal of the History of Sexuality.