Gretchen Adams’s particular interests are in the intellectual and cultural processes involved in American nation building, particularly the development and role of a distinctive set of American cultural myths and memories. Professor Adams received her Ph.D. from the University of New Hampshire in 2001 following undergraduate and graduate work at the University of Oregon. She is currently associate professor of history at Texas Tech University where she teaches courses in topics in nineteenth-century U.S. history and in the field of “history and memory.”
Gretchen Adams received the TTU Alumni Association New Faculty Award in 2005. She has also been awarded grants and resident fellowships for her research from the American Historical Association, Brown University’s Center for the Study of American Civilization, the American Antiquarian Society, and a number of other research libraries.
Her book, The Specter of Salem: Remembering the Witch Trials in Nineteenth-Century America, was published by the University of Chicago Press. Choice named the book an Outstanding Academic Title, writing, “This well-researched book, forgoing the usual heft of scholarly studies, is not another interpretation of the Salem trials, but an important major work within the scholarly literature on the witch-hunt, linking the hysteria of the period to the evolving history of the American nation.”