Elizabeth Mesok is a postdoctoral fellow in Global American Studies at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History. Prior to coming to Harvard, she completed her Ph.D. in American Studies at New York University in 2013. Her interests include the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality, militarism and war, and the history of U.S. empire.

Mesok’s current book project, Warring Subjects: Gender, Liberalism, and U.S. Global Warfare, considers the value of women soldiers’ gender difference for U.S. counterinsurgency campaigns in the most recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Other research projects include an analysis of the perceived ‘epidemic’ of sexual violence in the U.S. military, not as an extraordinary crisis owing to women’s increased military presence, but rather as a mode of violence endemic to U.S. military culture.

In fall 2014, Mesok’s seminar, “Women and War: Gender, Race, and the Politics of Militarism,” encourages students to think beyond what men and women do in war and instead to consider how gendered constructs are necessary to, and constituted by, war. This course reflects Mesok’s commitment to an interdisciplinary and transnational approach to the study of race, gender, and sexuality, pairing theoretical scholarship alongside primary material such as memoirs, poems, and documentaries.