Tracey Jean Boisseau received her B.A. in History and Women's Studies in 1985 from Suffolk University in Boston. She received a M.A. in U. S. History from Georgetown University in 1988 and her Ph.D. in U.S. Women's history from Binghamton University (SUNY) in 1996.
After earning her M.A. from Georgetown in Washington, D.C., Professor
Boisseau moved to Michigan to teach history at Cranbrook-Kingswood, a private
secondary school in Bloomfield Hills. In 1989, she moved to Los Angeles,
California, where she taught at area colleges and substitute taught in the
Los Angeles County juvenile detention and prison system. In 1990, she plunged
back into graduate study in Binghamton, New York. While her master's work
concentrated on the social histories of early modern America, England and
France, she now turned her attention to the study of modern U.S. women's
history, social theory, Middle-Eastern women's studies, and African-American
women's history.
From 1991 to 1994, Professor Boisseau read and researched her doctoral
thesis, supporting herself by teaching at colleges in the Boston area. In
1994, she traveled to Uganda and Tanzania in East Africa where she completed
research and wrote the first draft of her thesis.
Dr. Boisseau's doctoral thesis examines the public life and professional
career of May French-Sheldon (1847-1936), a white American woman who claimed
to be the first "woman explorer" of Africa. In 1891, French-Sheldon
led a caravan trek through the Kilimanjaro region of East Africa. In 1892,
she published Sultan
to Sultan: Adventures among the Masai and Other Tribes of East Africa,
an ethnographic account of her experiences. French-Sheldon's career as a
public speaker and authority on Africa, colonial methods, racial matters,
and women's advancement in society spanned the period 1891 to 1927 and provides
scholars with a convenient window onto the construction of U.S. feminist
identities in the 20th century.
Dr. Boisseau has published aspects of her doctoral research in Signs
and Gender and History. She has also annotated and provided an introductory
essay for a new edition of Sultan to Sultan (University of Manchester
Press/St. Martin's Press, 1999). In 1995, she returned to Boston, revised
her thesis and taught at the only public school of art in the United States,
Massachusetts College of Art. In 1997, she moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota
and in 1998 to Chicago, where she taught history at area universities and
colleges and worked on several publishing projects. In 1999, she accepted
the position of Assistant Professor of U.S. women's history at the University
of Akron in Ohio.
Originally hailing from the Northeast, Dr. Boisseau now divides her time between Akron and Chicago in the Midwest and her home-base in New England. Her most treasured spot among these various welcoming hearths lies along the shores of the Damariscotta River in mid-coast Maine. Here, she and friends (see photos below) communally occupy several enchanting acres of rocky soil, wooded groves, and cranberry bogland edging a tiny salt-water cove created by a reversing waterfall.