Education
Ph.D., College of William and Mary, 2002
Elizabeth Kelly Gray, Ph.D.
Professor
Contact Info
Areas of Expertise
United States in the early national and antebellum eras; teaching methods of research and writing in History.
Biography
Elizabeth Kelly Gray earned her Ph.D. in History at the College of William and Mary in 2002. After teaching for a year at William and Mary, she joined Towson’s Department of History as the historian of nineteenth-century America. She recently published Habit Forming: Drug Addiction in America, 1776–1914, with Oxford University Press. Her current book project focuses on antebellum Baltimore.
Dr. Gray also focuses on improving ways to teach methods of historical research and writing. She primarily teaches writing-intensive courses: History 300, Introduction to Historical Study, with a focus on nineteenth-century America, and Towson Seminar 102, with focuses on “America’s War on Drugs” and “The U.S. Constitution.”
Selected Publications
Habit Forming: Drug Addiction in America, 1776–1914. Oxford University Press, 2023.
“Was Edgar Allan Poe a Habitual Opium User?” on Commonplace.online, February 2022
“The World by Gaslight: Urban-gothic Literature and Moral Reform in New York City, 1845–1860,” American Nineteenth-Century History, 10, no. 2 (June 2009)
“‘Whisper to him the Word 'India': Trans-Atlantic Critics and American Slavery, 1830–1860,” The Journal of the Early Republic 28 (Fall 2008)
“The Trade-Off: Chinese Opium Traders and Antebellum Reform in the United States, 1815–1860,” in Drugs and Empires: Essays in Modern Imperialism and Intoxication, c. 1500–c. 1930, James H. Mills and Patricia Barton, eds. (Palgrave, 2007)
Recent Book Reviews
“Think Globally, Reform Locally,” a review of Timothy Mason Roberts’s Distant Revolutions:
1848 and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism for Common-place. The Interactive Journal of Early American Life 10 (January 2010).
Review of Walter Nugent, Habits of Empire: A History of American Expansion for Oregon.
Historical Quarterly 110, no. 3 (Fall 2009).
“The Deep and Deeper South,” a review of Matthew Pratt Guterl’s American Mediterranean:
Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation for Common-place. The Interactive Journal of Early American Life 9 (January 2009).
Recent Conferences Papers
Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, 2010
Presented “Habitual Opium Use and Secrecy in Early-Republic America”
History of Women’s Health Conference, Pennsylvania Hospital, 2010
Presented “American Women and Opiate Addiction, 1776–1914”
Les effets de l'abolition de la traite par la Grande-Bretagne sur les discours nationaux,
Paris, France, June 2009. Presented “‘Whisper to him the word ‘India’’: Trans-Atlantic
Critics and American Slavery, 1830–1860”
Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, 2008
Presented “American Opiate Addiction in a Global Context, 1800–1860"
American Association for Chinese Studies, 2007
Presented “Chinese Opiate Addiction and American Perceptions, 1815–1860”
Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, 2007
Presented “Asiatic Cholera and Peruvian Bark: American Physicians and the World, 1800–1840”
Courses Taught
| FALL 2024 | |
|---|---|
| HIST 300 | Introduction to Historical Study. Topic: US History 1789-1877 & Towson History |
| TSEM 102 | Towson Seminar. Topic: The US Constitution |