Dr. Rebecca Jo Plant Bio

Dr. Rebecca Jo Plant is a Professor of History and an Academic Senate Distinguished Teacher. Her research interests focus on gender and family history and the social and psychological impact of war in the nineteenth and twentieth-century U.S. 

Born in 1968, Rebecca grew up in Kansas City, attended college at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, and later moved to Baltimore to pursue graduate studies. Rebecca received her PhD in history from Johns Hopkins University in 2001. That year her thesis was awarded the Lerner-Scott Prize from the Organization of American Historians for the best dissertation in U.S. women's and gender history. She taught for two years at Vanderbilt University before 
coming to the University of California, San Diego in 2002.

Rebecca’s most recent book, coauthored with France M. Clarke (University of Sydney) is Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era (Oxford University, 2023). She is also the author of Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America (Chicago, 2010) and co-editor of Maternalism Reconsidered: Motherhood, Welfare, and Social Policies in the Twentieth Century (Berghahn, 2012). 

She has held fellowships from the American Association of University Women, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Australian Research Council. Together with Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, she is currently coeditor of the journal and database Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000.