Stephanie Mitchell

Professor Stephanie Mitchell holds a doctorate from Oxford University and an MA and BA in History from the University of Virginia.

She directs the international research project “Women’s Suffrage in the Americas,” which connects both researchers and suffrage histories from across our hemisphere. She is also interested in conservative women, and her current book (which is under contract with the University of New Mexico Press) is about 20th-century women in Latin America who affiliated with the fascist Spanish falange.

At Carthage, Prof. Mitchell teaches a variety of courses on Latin American history, including Mexico, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean. She is the faculty mentor for the student clubs Mi Gente and Phi Alpha Theta (history honor society). She is a strong believer in the importance of education for the whole person: body, mind, and spirit. She is a campus leader on several projects to help Carthage educate holistically, including the Callings Program, which helps students explore and discern their vocations through conversations, and the Educating Character Program, which seeks to connect individuals with community flourishing.

As a teacher, Prof. Mitchell uses several novel pedagogical approaches: collaborative online international learning (where students at Carthage are paired with students at other universities abroad to learn together), low-stakes, high-frequency assessment (to help keep standards high but anxiety low), reacting to the past (where students “become” figures from history using complex role-playing games that reveal insights to students that reading books can’t), and undergraduate research (where students at any level of experience participate in knowledge creation).

Hear From Prof. Mitchell: Why History?

“I am a Latin American historian. I chose my field during the Cold War, when the United States was actively involved in armed conflicts throughout the Americas, from Chile and Argentina in the Southern Cone, to Central America and the Caribbean. When I was the age most of my students are now, it seemed to me that there was nothing more important than learning about how these nightmarish conflicts had come to occur so that we could avoid making the same mistakes in the future. I still believe this is a good reason to study history, but I also understand now that studying history is simply one of the best ways to make yourself smarter and more disciplined.”

“Being a history major is a big challenge, but big challenges often pay off. Really smart, really capable people with hearts as big as their brains will be useful wherever they go after college. Whether they are serving their employers, their families, their faith communities, or a civic organization, their contributions will be valuable to the common good.”

• D.Phil. — Oxford University
• M.A., B.A. — University of Virginia

• HIS 1400 Issues in Latin American History: Central America
• HIS 1410 Dictatorship and Democracy: History of South America
• HIS 2200 Historical Methods
• HIS 3050 History of Mexico
• HIS 4000 Seminar

Prof. Mitchell is a Latin Americanist who works primarily on women’s and gender history. Her current book looks at women from throughout Latin America who affiliated with the fascist government in Spain. She also leads a team of international researchers who study how women obtained the suffrage in the Americas.

• 2025-26 Educating Character Capacity Building Grant to design a proposal to integrate character development across our campus culture.
• 2023-25 NetVUE Program Development Grants to promote vocational exploration and discernment through skilled, guided conversation with trained faculty and staff. This grant funded the Carthage Callings Program.
• 2018 National Endowment for the Humanities: Summer Institute on Women’s Suffrage in the Americas. This grant funded the collaboration of more than 50 scholars from across the hemisphere to work on a better understanding of how women achieved the vote in the Americas.

Books

• “Mujeres de la Raza,” under contract with University of New Mexico Press.
• “Women’s Suffrage in the Americas,” University of New Mexico Press, 2024.
• “The Women’s Revolution,” Mexico 1917-1943, co-edited with Patience Schell, Rowan and Littlefield, 2007.

Peer-Reviewed Articles and Book Chapters:

• “Out from the shadows: gendered archetypes and the landscape of history,” Women’s History Review, 1-25. 2025. https://doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2025.2502702.
• “Mujeres de la Raza: Trans-Atlantic women’s organizing and Hispanidad, 1922-1977,” Mujeres y relaciones Internacionales en el siglo XX, coordinated by Fabián Herrera León, Itzel Toledo García, and Laura Beatriz Moreno Rodríguez, Mexico: Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, 2024.
• “Women’s Suffrage in the Americas: Lessons Learned and Challenges Ahead.” Historia Regional. Sección Historia. ISP Nº 3, Villa Constitución, Año XXXVI, Nº 49, May-August 2023, pp. 1-13, ISSNe 2469-0732. http://historiaregional.org/ojs/index.php/historiaregional/index.
• “Mexican Modernities.” Journal of Women’s History 35, no. 2 (2023): 147–52. https://doi.org/10.1353/jowh.2023.a899544.
• “Death of a Revolution: Women’s Suffrage and Mugiquismo in the 1940 Election in Mexico.” Descentrada, 7(1), e197, 2023. https://doi.org/10.24215/25457284e197.
• Harms, Patricia and Mitchell, Stephanie. Reflections on a Transnational Project: Suffrage in the Americas. Journal of International Women’s Studies, 20(8), 110-120, 2019.
• “President Lazaro Cardenas and Cardenismo,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History, Oxford University Press, 2017. 
• “Revolutionary Feminism, Revolutionary Politics: Suffrage under Cardenismo” Americas, Volume 72, Number 3, July 2015.
• “The Women’s Revolution: The Revolutionary Women’s Movement to 1940” Revolución, historia y legado. Una visión exógena. Coordinado por Federico Fernández Christlieb y Guadalupe C. Gómez Aguado de Alba. Editado por el Centro de Enseñanza para Extranjeros, UNAM, 2012.