Dr. Andrea Lowgren
Cascade Campus
Terrell Hall 226
andrea.lowgren@pcc.edu
971-722-7259
Background
I was born and raised in Napa, California and moved to Oregon in 1995 to do a BA in History and Music with a minor in Spanish at Linfield College followed by a MA in musicology at the University of Oregon. Afterwards, I went to Santa Cruz, California for my doctoral education. I received my PhD in History with an emphasis in Feminist Studies in 2007 and that fall I moved to Portland in order to teach full-time at Portland Community College.
Research and Interests
My research interests are in the histories of women, sexuality, race and urban geography. My dissertation, “City Limits: Reputation and the Sexual Cartography of Women’s Mobility in Mid-twentieth-century San Francisco” shows how for women, the politics of space was the politics of sex. My research maps the urban expressions of women’s sexuality in nightclubs, red light districts, and on neighborhood streets through the categories of work, entertainment, state policing, and sexual violence. By focusing on the city of San Francisco between the 1930s and the 1960s, it navigates the topography of sexuality over a specific terrain, making it possible to draw out quotidian details of sexual life. In doing so it focuses on the concept of sexual reputation – the mid-twentieth-century version of sexual respectability. Women in San Francisco carefully managed their sexual reputations in specific class- and race-influenced ways in order to successfully market themselves in the sexual economy, find sexual enjoyment, protect their respectability, keep themselves safe from sexual violence, and avoid state authorities. Concern about reputation led to self-imposed limitations of urban mobility that combined with state regulation and sexual violence to create surprisingly resilient geographic boundaries for women. Understanding how the containment of women’s mobility was built into a society’s ideas about sexuality helps to explain how and why restrictions on women’s movements seemed invisible and complete, providing a new lens for understanding the gendered inequality of urban spatial freedom.
My most recent project is an Open Educational Resource. The Reasons We Are Here: Oral Histories at Portland Community College? is a project focusing on the stories of immigration from community college students, staff, faculty and alumni. It consists of a series of twenty-four oral histories transcribed and compiled into an ebook for use as a text in college courses. The goals are for students to see immigrants as a core part of recent US History as well as disrupting the media’s oversimplification of immigrant motivations. https://openoregon.pressbooks.pub/pccimmigration/
My professional interests are currently focused on teaching. I orient my classes towards achieving social justice. I think that understanding the structural relationships of power in history not only explains present-day inequities but also provides avenues for truer reconciliation. In addition, identifying and critiquing hierarchies of privilege can hopefully direct students toward greater global consciousness and meaningful citizenship. I also think that place-based learning can bring history alive. And if I cannot take my students with me, I want to expand my own study in a geographically-focused manner because I think it offers an invaluable immediacy to the teaching of history. When I tell the story of an event or of a people, I also describe the world they lived in – the sights and sounds of their world and the effects of this environment on people’s ideologies and actions. For this reason I love to travel. Some of the places that I’ve visited and studied are: Jordan, Haiti, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Belize, El Salvador, Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Turkey, Bosnia, Croatia, Iceland, a lot of the US and most of Europe.
Courses
- History 201: History of the U.S. to 1840*
- History 202: History of the U.S. 1840 to 1914*
- History 203: History of the U.S. 1914 to Present*
- History 225: History of Global Sexualities and Families
- History 271: History of Central America and the Caribbean
- Women’s Studies 101: Introduction to Women’s Studies
- Women’s Studies 202: Women Working for Change
- Women’s studies 210: Introduction to Queer Studies