Dr Mara Keire

Departmental Lecturer in US History

Rothermere American Institute

mara.keire@rai.ox.ac.uk

Research Interests

Rape Culture
War on Drugs
Feminism

Mara Keire is interested in the cultural, intellectual, and legal history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in the United States. Her previous scholarship focused on red-light districts, vice reform, and the development of the new commercial popular culture in the early twentieth century. She is currently working on two projects: Under the Boardwalk: Rape and Popular Culture in New York, 1900-1929 and Apocalypse Americana: How Americans Have Imagined the End of the World Since the Dropping of the Atomic Bomb.

See page the Rothermere American Institute website

For Business and Pleasure: Red-Light Districts and the Regulation of Vice in the United States, 1890-1933 (Johns Hopkins University Press, March 2010).

Anti-vice reformers in the late nineteenth century accepted that complete eradication of disreputable pleasure was impossible. Seeking a way to regulate rather than eliminate prostitution, alcohol, drugs, and gambling, urban reformers confined sites of disreputable pleasure to red-light districts in cities throughout the United States. They dismissed the extremes of prohibitory law and instead sought to limit the impact of vice on city life through realistic restrictive measures.

The American Populists

'In our Time', BBc Radio 4

15 June 2017

Sarah Laskow, 'Most American Cities Once Had Red-Light Districts'

Atlas Obscura

15 March 2017

‘Ask an Academic: Debauchery’

The New Yorker

14 April 2010

‘The “White Slavery” Panic’

BackStory, National Public Radio

22 November 2013

FHS	Masters
GH XVII: History of the United States Since 1863	Methods and Evidence in the History of the United States of America

Dr Mara Keire

Featured Publication

For Business and Pleasure: Red-Light Districts and the Regulation of Vice in the United States, 1890-1933 (Johns Hopkins University Press, March 2010).

In the Media

The American Populists

Sarah Laskow, 'Most American Cities Once Had Red-Light Districts'

‘Ask an Academic: Debauchery’

‘The “White Slavery” Panic’

Teaching

Rothermere American Institute

Publications