Agatha Beins, Ph.D.

Contact

abeins@twu.edu
940-898-2117
HDB 307L

Biography

Dr. Agatha Beins finds material culture fascinating, and her research, writing, and teaching explore how objects in the social and natural world gain meaning. For example, her book Liberation in Print: Feminist Periodicals and Social Movement Identity (University of Georgia Press, 2017) explores the ways that newsletters and newspapers in the U.S. women's liberation movement constructed feminism as a collective identity. Analyzing them as material objects and curated spaces of words and images, she offers a material-cultural history of feminist activism through these polyvocal, energetic publications. And her class, "Art, Activism, and Social Justice," explores the way creative artifacts hold and produce political power. Because it can challenge our ideas about the world and offer visions to build new worlds, art gets taken up as a tool for transformation by artists and within social movements.

Dr. Beins's research and writing has been supported by grants and fellowships, including the Bonquois Postdoctoral Fellowship at Tulane University, Barnard College Library research award, Margaret Storrs Grierson Scholar-in-Residence Fellowship and Sophia Smith Collection, and American Association of University Women Dissertation Fellowship.

Education

Ph.D., Women's and Gender Studies, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ
M.F.A., Poetry, Eastern Washington University, Cheney, WA
M.A., Women's Studies, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ
B.A., Classical Languages, Carleton College, Northfield, MN

Research Interests

Histories of Feminism; Women's and Gender Studies in Higher Education; Social Movements; Print and Material Cultures; Cultural Studies; Art and Activism; Pedagogy; Food Studies

Latest Articles

Field Materialities: Building Women's and Gender Studies One Page at a Time
Women's Studies Quarterly (2023)
Agatha Beins

Material Utopianism: Feminist Movement Building in the Twentieth Century (book review)
Journal of Women’s History (2022)
Agatha Beins

Review of The Death of Things: Ephemera and the American Novel by Sarah Wasserman
Winterthur Portfolio (2021)
Agatha Beins

A Political Pause: Multiple Temporalities of Activism in the Feminist Newspaper Distaff
Feminist Formations (2021)
Agatha Beins

City Bike Map, New Orleans, Louisiana (poem)
Thimble Literary Magazine (2020)
Agatha Beins

Review of Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War by Ronak K. Kapadia
Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics (2020)
Agatha Beins

Review of The Feminist Bookstore Movement: Lesbian Antiracism and Feminist Accountability
Feminist Review (2020)
Agatha Beins

Click! The Ongoing Feminist Revolution
The Journal of American History (2018)
Agatha Beins

A Publishing Assemblage: Building Book History Methodology through Feminist Periodicals
American Periodicals (2018)
Agatha Beins

Inter- and Trans-national Feminist Theory and Practice in Triple Jeopardy and Conditions
Women's Studies: An Inter-disciplinary Journal (2018)
Agatha Beins

Measures of Viability (poem)
The Knicknackery (2017)
Agatha Beins

Review of Letting Go: Feminist and Social Justice Insight and Activism edited by Donna King and Catherine G. Valentine
Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews (2017)
Agatha Beins

Small Talk and Chit Chat: Using Informal Communication to Build a Learning Community Online
Transformations (Wayne): The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy (2017)
Agatha Beins

Review of Making Noise, Making News: Suffrage Print Culture and U.S. Modernism by Mary Chapman
SHARPNews (2016)
Agatha Beins

Fruit
Potomac Review (2015)
Agatha Beins

Books

Effective Writing in Psychology: Papers, Posters, and Presentations, 3rd edition
Blackwell (2020)
Bernard Charles Beins, Agatha Beins

Liberation in Print: Feminist Periodicals and Social Movement Identity
University of Georgia Press (2017)
Agatha Beins

Chapters

Laying the Type of Revolution
in Print Culture in the Americas: Archives, Materiality, and the Rewriting of Literary History | Bloomsbury Publishing (2022)
Agatha Beins

A Life in the Country: Lesbians and Feminists Living on the Land
in Representing Rural Women | Lexington Books (2019)
Julie R. Enszer, Agatha Beins

Making a Place for Lesbian Lives at the Lesbian Herstory Archives
in Out of the Closet and into the Archives: Researching Sexual Histories | University of Illinois Press (2016)
Agatha Beins

A Revolution in Ephemera: Feminist Newsletters and Newspapers in the 1970s
in This Book Is an Action: Feminist Print Culture and Activist Aesthetics | SUNY Press (2015)
Agatha Beins

Externally Funded Projects

Humanities Texas Mini Grant
Humanities Texas | $1,500.00 | 2020
Role: Co-Principal Investigator

Special Collections Research Fellowship
University of North Texas | $1,000.00 | 2018
Role: Principal Investigator

Barnard Library Research Award
Barnard College | $2,500.00 | 2017
Role: Principal Investigator

Internally Funded Projects

College of Arts and Sciences Creative Arts and Humanities Grant
GOV-Texas Woman's University | $5,000.00 | 2023
Research Grant

TWU Travel Assistance Fund
GOV-Texas Woman's University | $800.00 | 2023
Research Grant

TWU Travel Assistance Fund
GOV-Texas Woman's University | $800.00 | 2019
Research Grant

TWU Travel Assistance Fund
GOV-Texas Woman's University | $800.00 | 2018
Research Grant

TWU Travel Assistance Fund
GOV-Texas Woman's University | $800.00 | 2017
Research Grant

Professional Affiliations

• American Association of University Women
• National Women's Studies Association
• Research Society for American Periodicals