Paula Petrik

Paula Petrik

Paula Petrik

Emeritus Faculty

U.S. History: 19th century U.S. social, trans-Mississippi West, business and economic history

Paula Petrik received her PhD from SUNY-Binghamton in 1982 and MFA from the University of Montana. She is the author of No Step Backward: Women and Family on the Rocky Mountain Mining Frontier and co-editor (with Elliott West) of Small Worlds: Children and Adolescents in America, 1850-1950. Recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to the United Kingdom, an NEH Fellowship, an Apple Computer Faculty Internship, and a Smithsonian Fellowship, among others, she has published articles on women in the American West, the U.S. toy industry, and new media.

Courses Taught

U.S. trans-Mississippi West
U.S. business history
history and new media
history of animation

Dissertations Supervised

Lee Ann Cafferata, Tredegar Iron Works, Richmond, Virginia: A Study of Industrial Survival, 1873-1892 (2016)

Ralph Suiter, "Vulgarizing American Children": Navigating Respectability and Commercial Appeal in Early Newspaper Comics (2016)

Jennifer Levasseur, Pictures by Proxy: Images of Exploration and the First Decade of Astronaut Photography at NASA (2014)

Jennifer Reeder, "To Do Something Extraordinary": Mormon Women and the Creation of a Usable Past (2013)