Wendy Rouse

Wendy Rouse

Early Tenure and Promotion to Associate Professor

Years at SJSU: 7

Department: Sociology and Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

RSCA focus: The history of women and children in the Progressive era, history education

Wendy Rouse, an associate professor of Sociology and Interdisciplinary Social Sciences, is the author of two books Her Own Hero: The Origins of the Women’s Self-Defense Movement and The Children of Chinatown: Growing  up Chinese American in San Francisco, 1850-1920. While she often finds insight into her subjects through traditional sources such as archives she visited at Tulane and Smith College, she also has become adept at using genealogical sources such as ancestry.com to reconstruct the life story of an individual.

The highlight of her time at SJSU has been “working with future teachers in the Social Science Teacher Preparation program.” Her research has focused on methods of teaching history as well as women and children in the Progressive era, and she has penned a chapter on film portrayals of women’s suffrage for Hollywood or History? An Inquiry-Based Strategy for Using Film to Teach U.S. History and a journal article on Chinese exclusion and resistance published in Teaching History: A Journal of Methods.

She tells students they should “research and study what you love.”

Note: Congratulations to the 43 faculty members who received tenure and/or promotion for 2018-19. We have invited each faculty member to participate in a series of posts profiling their teaching, service, and research, scholarship and creativity activities. Those faculty who opted to participate will be featured throughout the fall semester on the Academic Spotlight blog and the digital sign in the Administration Building lobby.