Julia Bouwkamp is a Ph.D. student at the University of Pennsylvania studying the history of the body through the intersecting lenses of gender, race, sexuality, and singleness. Her research examines medical, cultural, and personal perceptions of the never-married female body in the early and nineteenth-century United States.
Before coming to Penn, Julia earned her MA in history from the University of Delaware. There she built on past experience in museums and public history by pursuing coursework in museum studies and by working as a graduate assistant at the Winterthur Museum.
At the University of Delaware, her paper “Not Like Other Old Maids: Spinster Heroines and Nineteenth-Century Physiology” won the William H. Williams award for outstanding scholarship in the area of American history during the period 1607-1865.
Advisor: Kathleen M. Brown
M.A., History, University of Delaware
B.A., History, Calvin University
history of the body; women's history; gender and sexuality studies; history of race; early American history, antebellum United States history, Atlantic world history; history of medicine; singleness studies