"These experiences have shaped my work as a historian and as a teacher, giving me an unyielding dedication to trying to understand the people I study as complex, and often contradictory, individuals."

Erin Johnson is a tenacious rising historian and parent whose research centers women’s emotional lives. Erin earned her bachelor’s in history from the University of Toledo, where she earned the Margaret Nachtrieb Award for Outstanding Female Undergraduate Major in History and graduated summa cum laude, and she went on to earn her master’s in history from Miami University. During this time, she was also committed to providing emotional and financial support to her family and became a mother. Erin says, “I have produced important scholarship and engaged with the campus community in a unique and productive way because of my experiences with challenging family dynamics and parenthood. These experiences have shaped my work as a historian and as a teacher, giving me an unyielding dedication to trying to understand the people I study as complex, and often contradictory, individuals.”

Erin’s master’s thesis, entitled “‘Strong Passions of the Mind’: Representations of the Mind-Body Connection and Women’s Reproductive Bodies in Early Modern England,’” explored in part how seventeenth-century beliefs about the relationship between emotion and the body worked to sustain the value of women’s roles in labor and delivery and limit women’s acceptable emotional expression. Erin is building on that work with her doctoral research, which focuses on the experiences of seventeenth-century women in the Bridewell and Bethlem Royal Hospitals. Erin’s advisor remarks that her research will “offer a new and important angle to understanding the lived experience of women in early modern Britain and how their experiences were understood and regulated.”

Erin’s mentors describe her as a “resourceful, thoughtful, and driven” scholar who has persisted through significant challenges with unflagging dedication to her research and her children. Going forward, Erin intends to work at a college or university, where she will undoubtedly be a remarkable mentor to and advocate for her students.

CEW+ commends Erin’s persistence and names her a Mary Malcomson Raphael Scholar.