Women's Studies Department   

Lois Helmbold, Chair 895-0837 e-mail for UNLV people: lois.helmbold@unlv.edu; e-mail for the rest of the world:  helmbold@unlv.nevada.edu Thanks!

Lois Rita Helmbold (Ph.D. American History, Stanford University, 1982), Professor and Chair of the Women’s Studies Department, is a member of the founding generation of women’s studies. She invented the first women’s studies course at San Jose State University in 1970, where she worked with students and faculty to establish a women’s studies program. Her primary research interests include the simultaneity of gender, race, and class in women’s lives; women’s work; working class women; and the Great Depression. Making Choices, Making Do: Survival Strategies of Black and White Working Class Women during the Great Depression is forthcoming. She has published widely in historical and women’s studies interdisciplinary journals, including Labor History, Feminist Studies, Frontiers, Reviews in American History, Women’s Review of Books, and in the award-winning Black Women in America: a Historical Encyclopedia. Among her honors are Phi Beta Kappa, Woodrow Wilson Fellow, Woodrow Wilson Teaching Intern, Rockefeller Humanist in Residence, and Fulbright Senior Lecturer in Japan. In her spare time she is an activist, a martial artist, and a quilter.