Jessica Pliley
Professor
Office: TMH 213
Email: jp74@txstate.edu
Phone: 512.245.6756
Jessica R. Pliley is an Associate Professor of the History of Women, Genders, and Sexualities and the Interim Director of Women’s and Gender Studies at Texas State University. She holds a Ph.D. from the Ohio State University. She is the author of Policing Sexuality: The Mann Act and the Making of the FBI (Harvard, 2014) and the co-editor of Global Anti-Vice Activism (Cambridge, 2016) and Fighting Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking: History and Contemporary Policy (Cambridge, 2021). Her work has appeared in the Journal of Women’s History, the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and the Journal of the History of Sexuality and several edited collections. Her current research explores the long history of anti-trafficking movement from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. For more information please visit her website at jessicapliley.com.
Select Publications
Books:
Jessica Pliley, Genevieve LeBaron, and David Blight, eds. Fighting Modern Day Slavery and Human Trafficking: History and Contemporary Policy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021).
Jessica Pliley, Robert Kramm, and Harald Fischer-Tiné, eds. Global Anti-Vice Activism, 1890 - 1950: Fighting Drinks, Drugs, and ‘Immorality,’ 1870 – 1940 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016); released in paperback (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
Jessica Pliley, Policing Sexuality: The Mann Act and the Making of the FBI (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).
Journal Articles & Book Chapters:
“Ambivalent Abolitionist Legacies: The League of Nations’ Investigations into Sex Trafficking,” Fighting Modern Day Slavery and Human Trafficking: History and Contemporary Policy ed. Genevieve LeBaron and Jessica Pliley (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2021).
“Trafficked White Slaves and Misleading Marriages in the Campaigns Against Sex Trafficking, 1885-1927,” Federal History (April 2019): 60-82.
“Archival Trouble: Researching the History of Sex Trafficking,” in Researching Forced Labour in the Global Economy: Methodological Challenges and Advances, ed. Genevieve LeBaron, Proceedings of the British Academy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
“Prostitutes and Prostitution in America,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History (New York: Oxford University Press); reprinted in print volume of American Urban History, ed. Timothy Gilfoyle (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).
“From White Slavery to Anti-Prostitution, The Long View: Law, Policy and Sex Trafficking,” in Human Bondage and Abolition: New Histories of Past and Present Slaveries, ed. Elizabeth Swanson and James Brewer Stuart, 190-220 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
“Protecting the Young and the Innocent: Age, Consent, and the Enforcement of the White Slave Traffic Act.” In Childhood Slavery Before and After Emancipation. Ed. Anne Mae Duane. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
“The FBI’s White Slave Division: The Creation of a National Regulatory Regime to Police Prostitutes in the United States, 1910 – 1917.” In Global Anti-Vice Activism, 1870 – 1940, ed. Harald Fischer-Tine, Jessica Pliley, and Robert Kramm. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
“Vice Queens & White Slavery: The FBI’s Crackdown on Elite Brothel Madams in 1930s New York City,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 25, no. 1 (Jan 2016): 137-67.
“The Petticoat Inspectors: Women Boarding Inspectors and the Gendered Exercise of Federal Authority,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 12, no. 1 (Jan 2013): 95-126.
“Claims to Protection: The Rise and Fall of Feminist Abolitionism in the League of Nations’ Committee on the Traffic in Women and Children, 1919-1936,” Journal of Women’s History 22, no. 4 (winter 2010): 90-113.
“Voting for the Devil: Unequal Partnerships in the Ohio Woman Suffrage Campaign of 1914,” Ohio History 115 (Spring 2008): 4-27.
Courses Taught
HIST 1310 | History of the United States, 1877 to the Present
History 1310 examines American history from conquest (1492) to 1877. The goal of this course is to prepare students to engage intelligently with important aspects of several historical debates What makes America American? Why are different American regions distinctive? What factors have shaped American race relations? How radical was the American Revolution? What role did religion play in shaping the nation? What caused the Civil War? To help students develop their own answers to questions such as these, this course aims to give them basic factual knowledge of American history before 1877, to teach them to think critically about historical sources, and to help them analyze and construct historical arguments.
HIST 1320 | History of the United States to 1877
History 1320 surveys the course of American history from the end of Reconstruction to the present. It is, then, the story of our times, of the forces, events, ideas, and individuals who have shaped the way the way we live. The course will focus on three interlocking themes: 1.) In the years since the Civil War, Americans have been shaped by and have attempted to shape the tremendous power of corporate capitalism. 2.) At the same time, they have grapples with the question of whether the promise of equality applies to all Americans or only a portion of society. 3.) Americans have also struggles to define the United States’ response to other nations, often with profound consequences for both domestic condition and the worlds’ response to the United States and its citizens. This class seeks to help students make connections between America’s economic development, its position within global politics, and the ongoing struggle to define the obligations and expectations of citizenship.
HIST 3373B | US Women's History
History 3373 examines the expectations and experiences of women in the United States from the Reconstruction era to the present. It explores the gendered nature of citizenship with in the United States, while also paying close attention to women's productive and reproductive labor. At its heart, the course challenges students to consider how class, race, and ethnicity have shaped women's experiences and brought women together and torn them apart.
HIST 4374A | History of American Sexualities
This course examines the history of sexuality in the United States from the colonial period to the end of the twentieth century. The class emphasizes the diversity of sexual behaviors, the role of sexual regulation, and modes of thought in the past, while exploring change over time.
HIST 4350U | Slaveries: Past and Present
Hist 4350U explores the significance of slavery in world history from the colonial period to today, from the emergence of racial trans-Atlantic chattel slavery in the 17th century to human trafficking now. We will read the works of historians, journalists, and activists.
HIST 5315A | American Sexualities
History 5345 addresses the history of sexualities in the United States from the colonial era to present to shed light on the ways that sexuality has shaped social life, establish conventions, and created spaces to defy norms.
HIST 5315B | Queer Histories in the United States
History 5315 addresses the history of minority sexualities in the United States from the colonial era to present to shed light on the ways that sexuality has shaped social life, establish identities, and created social movements.
HIST 5316B | Women and Empire
From 1492 until World War II the globe was dominated by imperialism. Hist 5316A course considers the ways that women, in the metropoles of Europe and throughout colonial settings, found their lives shaped by empire.
HIST 5345Q | Gender and Citizenship
History 5345 is designed to introduce graduate students to the literature in United States Women’s history that addresses the relationship of women to the state from the colonial period to the present. This course considers five historiographical approaches to understanding women’s citizenship that also correspond to five chronological time periods; in other words, the course is structured both thematically and chronologically.
HIST 5351F | Women in Modern America
History 5351F offers graduate students an introduction in the topics, themes, and issues that animate the history of women in modern America (defined as 1861 to present). During this semester we will examine the historiography of Women History, as well as analyzing how women’s status as women has defined their opportunities in the United States, while also looking at how women’s experiences diverge from one another.
Honors College | From White Slavery to Sex Trafficking
This course seeks to historicize the globalized migration of sex workers and the modern-day anti-sex trafficking movement by tracing the origins of the anti-white slavery movement in the late nineteenth to the debates about sex work and sex trafficking of the twenty-first centuries. While this course is focused on the United States, it seeks to place the U.S. in a transnational and comparative context while also considering various interdisciplinary approaches.