ADA – Accomplished History professor and East Central University alumna Dr. Shae Smith Cox will return to campus this month to deliver the annual Rothbaum Lecture.
Cox is an assistant professor of History at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, Louisiana, where she teaches courses on women’s history, Southern history and the U.S. Civil War. The topic of her lecture is “When Women Vote: Struggles and Triumphs of the 19th Amendment.”
ECU’s Rothbaum Lecture is traditionally delivered on Constitution Day. This year, the event will take place on September 20 in the Raymond Estep Multimedia Center, located inside the Bill S. Cole University Center. Her lecture begins at 6:30 p.m. and is free and open to the public.
Cox earned her Ph.D. in American History from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in May 2020, with a minor in Public History. She specializes in 19th century race and gender with an emphasis on material culture and memory of the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction.
A noted expert in the field, Cox contributed the chapter titled “Outfitting the Lost Cause: The Recreation of Memory, Identity, and Southern Sectionalism through Civil War Uniforms, 1865-1920s,” to Buying and Selling Civil War Memory in Gilded Age America, published in July 2021 by the University of Georgia Press. To learn more about her, visit www.shaesmithcox.com.
The Rothbaum Lecture is funded by an endowment established by the late Julian Rothbaum with a $25,000 gift to the ECU Foundation, which was matched by the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education. Rothbaum also established an endowment to fund the George Nigh Award for ECU’s top graduating senior.
A native of Tulsa, Rothbaum was a longtime leader in Oklahoma civic affairs, a 1986 inductee into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame, and a member of the Oklahoma State Regents for High Education and the University of Oklahoma Regents. He passed away in 2003.
For more information on the Rothbaum Lecture, please contact Dr. Scott Barton, ECU History professor, at sbarton@ecok.edu or 580-559-5563.
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