Rebecca McKenna

Biography

Rebecca Tinio McKenna is an associate professor of History and co-director of Notre Dame’s University Seminar Program. Her research and teaching center on modern American social and cultural history; she is especially interested in the history of U.S. imperialism and the intersections of capitalism and culture. Her first book, American Imperial Pastoral: The Architecture of US Colonialism in the Philippines (Chicago, 2017) was awarded the Myrna F. Bernath Book Prize by The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. She is currently at work on a material and cultural history of the piano, a project supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship.

McKenna is a recipient of the Rev. Edmund P. Joyce, C.S.C. Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. She teaches undergraduate courses on historical methods; the Gilded Age and Progressive Era; Interwar U.S.A.; U.S. social and cultural history; Sound, Noise, and Music in Turn of the Twentieth-Century America; and the United States in the World. She also teaches graduate courses on 20th c. U.S. History and on comparative empires.

McKenna is a Faculty Fellow with the Liu Institute for Asia & Asian Studies and the Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion. She is also a Faculty Affiliate with Notre Dame’s Initiative on Race and Resilience.