Research Interests: American West, Women's history, Environmental History, U.S. Social theory. Profile: Virginia Scharff is a Distinguished Professor of History and Director of the Center for the Southwest at the University of New Mexico, where she also serves as Associate Provost for Faculty Development. Her scholarly publications include Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age (1991); Twenty Thousand Roads: Women, Movement, and the West (2003), two textbooks, Present Tense: The United States Since 1945 (1996); and Coming of Age: America in the Twentieth Century (1998); Home Lands: How Women Made the West (coauthored with Carolyn Brucken, 2010); and the edited volume, Seeing Nature Through Gender (2003). She is Women of the West Chair at the Autry National Center in Los Angeles, and a Fellow and Executive Board Member of the Society of American Historians. She was President of the Western History Association for 2008. Scharff’s most recent book, The Women Jefferson Loved (HarperCollins, 2010) was named a New York Times “Editor’s Choice.” She is also the author of four mystery suspense novels, written under the name of VIRGINIA SWIFT: Brown-Eyed Girl (2000), Bad Company (2002), Bye, Bye, Love (2004), and Hello, Stranger (2006). She is at work on an exhibition and book about the Civil War and the West.
