Assistant Professor
American West
Department of History
303C Milam Hall
Corvallis, OR 97331
Phone: (541) 737-1258
Fax: (541) 737-1257
Email: stacey.smith@oregonstate.edu
Stacey Smith specializes in the history of the North American West, with a particular emphasis on race relations, labor, and politics in nineteenth-century California. She teaches courses on the American West and the Civil War and Reconstruction as well as the U.S. history survey.
Background
Smith’s current work explores the intersection of western history and the history of slavery. Her present project, “California Bound: Unfree Labor, Race, and the Reconstruction of the Far West,” seeks to recast the story of the sectional crisis, emancipation, and Reconstruction in the United States by geographically recentering it in California. Weaving together the histories of a diverse array of unfree Californians—American Indian apprentices, illegally enslaved African Americans, contract laborers from Asia and Latin America, and bound Chinese prostitutes—she explores how California went through its own distinctive, regional struggle over unfreedom that both reshaped the social and legal landscape of the West and transformed the face of national Reconstruction politics.
Smith completed her Ph.D.in 2008 at the University of Wisconsin, where she received support for her work from the Western History Association, the American Historical Association, the Huntington Library, the Doris G. Quinn Foundation, the Institute for Research in the Humanities, and the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies. In addition to revising her dissertation for publication, she is currently co-editing The California Gold Rush: A History in Documents for Oxford University Press.
