About Claire
Though I’ve always had a love for teaching, I didn’t fall in love with history until high school, when the study of modern China convinced me that true stories are better than fiction. As an undergraduate at George Mason University, the wonderful staff in the History Department challenged me intellectually and inspired me to pursue history as a career. In 2011, they kindly welcomed me back into the fold when they accepted me into their graduate program.
My interests over the years have varied. As an undergraduate I spent most of my time studying East Asian history, with a particular focus on Modern China. I stumbled upon a love for American history when I took several women’s history courses, which developed into a permanent interest in the importance of gender, and identity formation in general. For my undergraduate thesis I wrote a paper titled “Turn the Body, Turn the World: How Communist China Inspired Radical Feminists in the United States during the 1960s and 70s.” In it I traced the ways in which radical feminists in the United States found inspiration for their own social movement in the Chinese Communist Revolution, thereby placing each movement within a broader global context.
After receiving my B.A. I spent two years living in Oakland, California and working in a large used bookstore in Berkeley, California, located two blocks from UC Berkeley. Berkeley is a mecca not only for bibliophiles, but for science fiction fans in particular. A lifelong fan of the genre in all its iterations, I was lucky enough to run the science fiction section in my bookstore, which immersed me in a community of science fiction lovers that deepened my appreciation of the genre’s cultural and social significance.
My current research focuses on space colonies. My approach toward this topic has varied, but one of the most fun aspects has been investigating why something so weird appeared to be something so common place to their supporters. Space colonies promised everything to every man, with a decided emphasis on white, middle-class Americans. Famed science fiction authors Ben Bova and Mack Reynolds wrote novels about space colonies, and Gerard O’Neill, inventor of modern space colonies, appeared on many popular television programs and in many popular magazines. This idea sparked the American imagination and continues to fascinate and inspire us to this day. I search for the genesis of this idea in sources detailing the state of popular science in America from 1965 (before the moonshot) to 1985 (after the successful implementation of NASA’s Space Shuttle program). The space dream did not die with Apollo 11, it simply took a different course. Space colonies are part of that journey.
I can be reached at loveclairepia@gmail.com.
