Faculty

Brandi C. Brimmer
Assistant Professor of History

PhD, University of California, Los Angeles, 2006

African American, African American Women’s History, US Women’s/Gender History

Telephone:  615-322-5948
Email: brandi.brimmer@vanderbilt.edu
Office Hours: W 3:00-5:00 pm, by appt. on Fridays
Office:  123 Benson Hall

Brandi C. Brimmer is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Vanderbilt University.  She studies the history gender and emancipation in the American South, with a particular focus on freedmen and women’s relationship with the federal government during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  She has received numerous awards for her work, including grants and fellowships from the Institute of American Cultures at UCLA, the North Caroliniana Society, the Sallie Bingham Research Center at Duke University, and the Department of Africana Studies at University of Notre Dame. 

Brimmer is a contributor to the second edition of the Black Women in America Encyclopedia and The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (forthcoming).   Her current work is focused on the newly freed African-American civil war widows’ struggle for social provision during the late 19th century.  Her analysis addresses how freedwomen’s ideas about marriage and family articulated during the application process challenged the Military Pension Bureau’s interpretation of what constituted a legitimate claim on the government. 

Brimmer received her BA in History from Spelman College, both her MA in African American Studies and her Ph. D. in United States History from the University of California at Los Angles.  She teaches undergraduate survey courses on the intersection of women/gender, sexuality, and race in the United States and more specialized courses on gender and the American South and women and social movements.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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