Betty C. Luther-Hillman

Instructor in History
Lewis Perry Professor in the Humanities
Appointed
2011
Betty Luter Hillman

Education

M.A. University of Chicago

Ph.D. Yale University

A.B. Harvard College

Biography

Ms. Luther-Hillman began her teaching career during college, when she taught at a summer camp for high school debaters. (She was on the debate team at her high school in Minnesota, and she enjoys advising the debate team at Exeter.) After college, she taught high school science for two years at a charter school in Washington, D.C. She continued working with high school students while in graduate school, teaching at the Center for Talented Youth (CTY), a summer program run by Johns Hopkins University, and also tutoring at public schools in Chicago, New Haven and Berkeley. 

Ms. Luther-Hillman joined the History Department in 2011 and primarily teaches U.S. history; she has also taught The World in the 20th Century, Race: A Global History, and Global Topics in Women, Gender and Society. Her undergraduate and graduate studies focused on 20th-century U.S. history and women's, gender, and sexuality studies. She also focused on LGBTQ+ history and designed the department's first course on this topic (making PEA one of the few secondary schools to offer a course on LGBTQ+ history). Her article “ ‘The Most Profoundly Revolutionary Act a Homosexual Can Engage In': Drag and the Politics of Gender Presentation in the San Francisco Gay Liberation Movement, 1964-1972” was published in the Journal of the History of Sexuality in 2011 and won the Best Article Prize from the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians. Ms. Lu-Hill (as her students call her) also revised her dissertation into a book titled "Dressing for the Culture Wars: Style and the Politics of Self-Presentation in the 1960s and 1970s", published in 2015 by the University of Nebraska Press.

After 10 years as a dorm faculty member in Hoyt and Amen halls, Ms. Luther-Hillman now lives off-campus with her family.

Publications

Dressing for the Culture Wars: Style and the Politics of Self-Presentation in the 1960s and 1970s. University of Nebraska Press. October 1, 2015.

"‘The Most Profoundly Revolutionary Act a Homosexual Can Engage In’: Drag and the Politics of Gender Presentation in the San Francisco Gay Liberation Movement, 1964-1972”. Journal of the History of Sexuality 2011.