Erin Bush, Ph.D.

Dr. Bush is an Associate Professor of U.S. and Digital History, the History Graduate Program Coordinator, and the academic adviser on the Dahlonega campus for students minoring in Gender Studies.

Her articles have appeared in Current Research in Digital History, Southern Cultures, and the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, where her article "For the Protection of our Children: The 1922 'Children's Code' and the Expansion of the Commonwealth's Eugenic Surveillance Authority" won the William M.E. Rachal Award for Best Overall Article in 2023. Dr. Bush is also the author of Under the Guise of Protection: Wayward Girls, Eugenics, and the Growth of Social Authority in Twentieth-Century Virginia (under contract at the University of Virginia Press). The book explores the connections between progressive reform, eugenics, and racial control in the New South by drawing on juvenile court and incarceration data, government records, and the papers of Virginia’s two segregated reformatories for girls—the Home and Industrial School for (White) Girls and the Industrial Home School for Colored Girls.

Dr. Bush’s research engages with American conceptions of criminality and institutions of punishment, reform in the “long” 20th century United States, and how identity markers such as gender, race, class, ethnicity, and sexuality influenced both. She teaches courses on the history of crime and punishment, United States history after 1865, the Gilded Age, Progressive Era, and Interwar periods, immigration and migration history, urban and industrial history, the history of gender and sexuality, and digital research methods.

She is the executive secretary of the Southern Association for Women Historians and a board member of the Virginia Forum.

Before returning to finish her doctoral degree, she built a career in technology companies managing digital products and the creative and technical people responsible for building them. Her technology background has influenced her approach to research and teaching.

• Social, cultural, & legal history of the U.S. since the Civil War
• Crime & punishment in U.S. History, including constructions of criminality, carceral institutions, and sensational trials
• Gender studies, particularly how ideals of femininity and masculinity influenced how societies have defined criminals 
• Digital research and methods, particularly data analysis and data ethics

• American Society for Legal History
• Association for Computers and the Humanities
• Coordinating Council for Women in History
• Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
• Southern Association of Women Historians
• The Southern Historical Association