Micki McElya is Associate Professor of History at the University of Connecticut. She specializes in the histories of women, gender, and race in the United States from the Civil War to the present, with an emphasis on political culture and memory. She is author of The Politics of Mourning: Death and Honor in Arlington National Cemetery (Harvard University Press, 2016) and Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America (Harvard University Press, 2007). McElya received her B.A. in history from Bryn Mawr College in 1994 and a Ph.D. from New York University in 2003. Before joining the faculty of the University of Connecticut, she was an assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama (2003-2008). She is currently at work on a book entitled Liberating Beauty: Feminism, the Civil Rights Movement, and Miss America.
