Karen Tice, Ph.D.

Professor Emeritus of Gender and Women’s Studies and Educational Policy Studies

Karen Tice is a professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and of Educational Policy Studies & Evaluation. Her teaching and research interests include transnational feminist movements, educational activism and student cultures, marketing student bodies, and class and feminist mobilizations. She is currently working on a book project on the history of feminist border crossings and solidarity activism in Cuba and debates about gender, sexuality, class, and radical politics.

Dr. Tice’s first book, Tales of Wayward Girls and Immoral Women: Case Records and the Professionalization of Social Work (University of Illinois Press, 1998), explored the surveillance and regulation of working-class and immigrant bodies and behavior in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by white, middle-class social reformers in the U.S. It focused on the micro-politics of class, narrative authority, and professional constructions of respectability, innocence, and degeneracy.

She examined the themes of class, race, body and beauty politics, normativity, self-regulation, performativity, and the corporatization of higher education and student cultures in her recent book, Queens of Academe: Beauty Pageants, Student Bodies, and Campus Life (Oxford University Press, 2012). This book was selected for the 2012 Critics Choice Book Award given by the American Educational Studies Association and for an Author Meets Critic session at the 2013 National Women’s Studies Association conference.