Katherine Parkin, Ph.D.

Books

NEW BOOK

Winner of the Emily Toth Award for best book in feminist popular culture, 2018!

Women at the Wheel: A Century of Buying, Driving, and Fixing Cars (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017)

Read More About This Book

• Web Site: katherinejparkin.com
• Twitter: twitter.com/authorkparkin
• Instagram: instagram.com/womenatthewheel
• Facebook: facebook.com/author.KatherineParkin
• Amazon
• University of Pennsylvania Press

Food is Love: Advertising and Gender Roles in Modern America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Read More About This Book Amazon University of Pennsylvania Press

Professor Parkin appeared on Bob Edwards’s NPR show. You can listen to her interview here: Part 1,    Part 2

Visit Food Advertisements Through the Decades, a database that includes some of the ads featured in Dr. Parkin’s book Food is Love.

Leap Year Postcard Database Dr. Parkin has compiled an extensive database that catalogs Leap Year postcards from 1904 through 1920. In the News Dr. Parkin’s postcard research and writings were noted in the following articles: “Why Women Proposing Is Still Rare, New York Times “100 years ago, Leap Day encouraged women to propose to men. It still hasn’t caught on, The Washington Post “Leap Year has a rich history — in marriage proposals, Chicago Tribune “Get a Hustle On—It’s Leap Year”, Slate.com Leap Year, Gender, and Reversing the Proposal Script, Sociological Images, The Society Pages Dr. Parkin was also featured on The Academic Minute radio broadcast on February 29, 2014.

Scholarly Articles

• “Alice Ramsey: Driving in New Directions,” New Jersey Studies, July 2018.
• Invited article, “Exploring Advertising History in Online Archives,” Advertising & Society Quarterly, 19(1) April 2018.
• “Adult Adoption and Intergenerational Same-Sex Relationships,” Notchesblog.com, December 2017.
• “’Bring Them Back Alive!’: Fear and the Macabre in US Automobile Tire Advertising,” Advertising & Society Quarterly 18 (1) April 2017: (published by Johns Hopkins University Press, available through Project Muse).
• “Glittering Mockery”: Twentieth-Century Leap Year Marriage Proposals,” Journal of Family History 37(1) January 2012: 85-104.”The Key to the Universe: Springsteen, Masculinity, and the Car,” in Bruce Springsteen and the American Soul: Essays on the Songs and Influence of a Cultural Icon, edited by David Izzo. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2011.
• “It’s Up to the Women: House Work and Identity in American Life,” Gender & History 22(2) August 2010: 451-457.“The Sex of Food and Ernest Dichter: The Illusion of Inevitability.” Advertising & Society Review 5(2) 2004.
• “Campbell’s Soup and the Long Shelf Life of Traditional Gender Roles.” Kitchen Culture in America: Representations of Food, Gender, and Race. Ed. Sherrie A. Inness. University of Pennsylvania Press, January 2001.

Presentations/Invited Talks

• “Alice Ramsey,” Tuesday Colloquium, The Smithsonian, National Museum of American History, May 2018.
• Invited lecture to the Annual Glass Seminar, “Advertising Pyrex to Women: 100 Years,” at the Corning Glass Museum, Corning, New York, October 16-17, 2015.
• In December 2005, I was an invited presenter at a symposium in Vienna, Austria, where I presented my paper, “‘The Power of Real, Unadulterated Sex’: Ernest Dichter, Libido, and American Advertising.”

Monmouth University history professor Katherine Parkin talks about men, the automobile, and mobility in late twentieth-century American culture. She also discusses how the music of Bruce Springsteen is central to capturing the meaning of the car for both men and women.

Watch the Video