Maureen A. Flanagan

Maureen Flanagan is an urban historian specializing in Chicago history and comparative processes of urbanization in the 19th and 20th centuries. Most of Flanagan's scholarly work focuses on issues of gender and urbanization. Flanagan also specializes in U.S. history generally with particular emphasis on the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Her teaching encompasses U.S. history, U.S. urban history, and comparative/global urban history.

Currently writing a book comparing the underlying gender assumptions that shaped the built environments of Chicago, Dublin, London, and Toronto from the 1870s to the 1940s.

Education

Ph.D., Loyola University of Chicago (1981)

Research Interests

Urban history with an emphasis on late 19th and early 20th centuries

Gender and urbanization

Comparative global urban history

U.S. cities in the Progressive Era

Professional Affiliations & Memberships

Organization of American Historians
American Historical Association
Urban History Association (US)
Urban History Group (UK)
Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

Awards

NEH Fellowship for College Professors
Fulbright Senior Teaching Fellowship to Egypt
Superior Achievement Award from Illinois State Historical Society for Seeing With Their Hearts

Publications

Books

America Reformed: Progressives and Progressivisms, 1890s-1920s

Seeing With Their Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of the Good City, 1871-1933 (Princeton, 2002)

Charter Reform in Chicago (Southern Illinois University, 1987)

Essays

“Private needs, public space: public toilets provision in the Anglo-Atlantic patriarchal city: London, Dublin, Toronto, and Chicago,” Urban History (February 2014)

Articles

“What a City Ought to Be and Do: Gender and Urbanism in Chicago, Dublin, and Toronto,” in Gender and Power in Irish History, Maryann Valiulis, ed. (October 2008, Irish Academic Press)

“The Workshop or the Home?” Gender Visions in the History of Urban Built Environments: Canada and the United States,” London Journal of Canadian Studies (2007)

"The City, Still the Hope of Democracy? from Jane Addams and Mary Parker Follett to the Arab Spring," Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive America (January 2013)

Projects

BOOK

• Working Title: Consolidating the Patriarchal City: Gender Ideals and the Built Environments of Chicago, Dublin, London, and Toronto, 1870s into the 1940s

ARTICLES

• "Housing the Homeless: Gender and the Lodging House Problem in the Early Twentieth Century Anglo-American City"
• “Middle-class Women as Cosmopolitans: London’s Octavia Hill, Alexandra College Dublin, and the Chicago Woman’s City Club in a Transatlantic Era”

Editorial Boards

Journal of Urban History
Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society

Professional Activities

Past President of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
Board of Directors, Urban History Association
Reviewer for National Endowment for the Humanities grant and fellowship applications
Book reviewer for the American Historical Review, Journal of American History, Journal of Urban History, Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and others