Rebecca Sharpless teaches and researches in U.S. women's history, particularly in the South. She received her Ph.D. from Emory University . Her first book, Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices: Women on Texas Cotton Farms, 1900-1940 (University of North Carolina Press, 1999), explored the lives of ordinary women in Central Texas . With Melissa Walker, she edited Work, Family, and Faith: Rural Southern Women in the Twentieth Century (University of Missouri Press, 2006). She is currently writing a study tentatively titled “Cooking in Other Women's Kitchens: African Americans in the South, 1865-1960.” Sharpless directed the Baylor University Institute for Oral History from 1993 to 2006 and in 2005-2006 served as president of the Oral History Association. She coedited The Handbook of Oral History (AltaMira Press, 2006). Sharpless is at present on the board of the Southern Association for Women Historians. She is married to Tom Charlton, a professor of history at Baylor, and they share their hundred-year-old house with four dogs of all shapes, sizes, and ages. She loves to cook and garden and is hopelessly addicted to New York Times crossword puzzles.

Visit Dr. Sharpless's webpage at http://faculty.tcu.edu/rsharpless/