Lois Banner

Professor of History: Women, gender, cultural history, nineteenth and twentieth century United States; masculinity studies, feminist studies, sexuality and queer studies.

A graduate of UCLA, with a Master’s Degree in European History and a Ph.D. from Columbia University in American history, Lois Banner was a founder of the field of women’s history in the 1970s. Along with Mary Hartman, she founded the Berkshire Conference in Women’s History, the biennial conference that has been held ever since and that is considered the major event in the field.
She was the first woman president of the American Studies Association, and in 2006 she won the Bode-Pearson prize of the American Studies Association for Lifetime Achievement in the field. Professor Banner is also a past president of the Pacific Coast Branch, American Historical Association, and of the Coordinating Committee in Women’s History of the American Historical Association.
She has also been a fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation, of the Radcliffe Institute of Harvard College, and of the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia.
Professor Banner is the author of ten books, including her acclaimed American Beauty (1983); In Full Flower: Aging Women, Power and Sexuality (1992), and the prize-winning Intertwined Lives: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Their Circle (2003). All three books were published by Alfred A. Knopf in New York City. In addition, she has published a history of American women in the Twentieth Century: Women in Modern America: A Brief History, published by Thompson, and continuously in print since 1974.
That same year she co-authored with Mary Hartman a selection of papers from the first Berkshire Conference. Titled Clio’s Consciousness Raised: New Perspective on the History of Women, it has become a classic in the field of women’s history. Her biography of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, published by Little, Brown, has been continuously in print since 1979.
In 1998 she published an autobiographical study, focusing on her personal journey into the Muslim religion, following the example of her high school best friend, with Columbia University Press. The book is titled Finding Fran: History and Memory in the Lives of Two Women.
She has also published many scholarly articles, in journals such as the American Historical Review, the Journal of American History, the American Quarterly, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and Cinema Studies, the journal of the Cinema Studies Association.
She has taught at a number of universities, including Princeton, Rutgers, Stanford, Hamilton College, George Washington University, the University of Maryland, and UCLA. She has been a professor of history and gender studies at USC since 1983. For several summers she taught at Josai University near Tokyo.
At USC she has chaired the history department and the gender studies program. She has won the Raubenheimer Award for outstanding achievement in teaching, scholarship, and college activities of the College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences. She has also won a general education award for teaching, the Mellon Foundation award for student mentoring, and the USC Associates Award for outstanding scholarship.
Professor Banner is currently at work on a two-volume study of glamour in the 19th and 20th centuries. She is currently at work on the second volume, a study of the life, image, and career of Marilyn Monroe. Her first book on Monroe, MM–Personal, will be published in Sept., 2010, by Harry Abrams.
Professor Banner has lectured widely in the United States, in Europe, and in Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. Her book reviews have appeared in innumerable journals.

• Ph.D. Columbia University, 1/1970
• B.A. University of California – Los Angeles
• M.A. Columbia College