Sara Lampert

Sara Lampert

Contributor

Sara Lampert is Associate Professor of history at the University of South Dakota, where she also coordinates the women, gender & sexuality studies program. Her book manuscript, Starring Women: Celebrity, Patriarchy, and American Theater and Culture, 1790-1850 (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press: Forthcoming 2020) uses the stories of itinerant female entertainers from Europe and the U.S. to map the shifting structures and gender politics of entertainment in the early U.S. This project reflects her larger interests in 19th century women’s & gender history, sexuality, celebrity, and popular entertainment. Lampert has also published on female platform performance in the mid-19th century and on the career of African-American singer Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield.

History

“Immoderate Menses” or Abortion? Bodily Knowledge and Illicit Intimacy in an 1851 Divorce Trial

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In 1851, four years after actress Josephine Clifton’s death, she was named as one of Edwin Forrest’s adulterers during the American actor’s divorce trial. Forrest was an established transatlantic celebrity who exemplified rugged American masculinity in both his roles and celebrity persona. In 1849, Forrest’s rivalry with English thespian William Charles Macready inspired the deadly… Read more →

History

“Instruction which she should avoid”: Reflections on 1830s Theater Manager Thomas Hamblin in the #MeToo Era

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In June 1838, actress Josephine Clifton canceled an engagement in Lexington, KY and rushed back to New York “in a state of mind bordering on distraction.”1 Her sixteen-year-old sister Louisa Missouri Miller, who had recently debuted on the same New York Bowery stage where Clifton’s own career began, was dead, as the coroner later determined,… Read more →