Rate My Professor Rebecca Sharpless

Rebecca Sharpless holds a Ph.D. in American Studies/Women's Studies from Emory University (1993), an M.A. in American Studies from Baylor University (1983), and a B.A. in English, magna cum laude, from Baylor University (1978). Her academic interests center on women in America and the South, Texas, food, sexuality, labor, and oral history. She has published influential works including Grain and Fire: A History of Baking in the American South (University of North Carolina Press, 2022), Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865-1960 (2010), Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices: Women on Texas Cotton Farms, 1900-1940 (1999), and Rock beneath the Sand: Country Churches in Texas (2003, with Lois E. Myers and Clark G. Baker). She co-edited Texas Women: Their Histories, Their Lives (2015, with Elizabeth Hayes Turner and Stephanie Cole) and Work, Family, and Faith: Rural Southern Women in the Twentieth Century (2006, with Melissa Walker), as well as the Handbook of Oral History (2006, with Lois E. Myers and Thomas L. Charlton). Her scholarship has shaped understandings of rural women's labor, domestic service, foodways, and Southern social history.