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November 07, 2025
History Colloquium Invited Book Talk with Eva Payne
In partnership with the UM Institute for the Humanities and the Faculty of Arts, please join us in hosting Eva Payne (Associate Professor of History, University of Mississippi) for a History Colloquium Invited Book Talk featuring Empire of Purity: The History of Americans’ Global War on Prostitution (Princeton University Press, 2024).
The event will be held on Friday, November 7, 2025 from 2:30 – 4:00 pm in Room 111 (Quiet Room), St. John’s College, University of Manitoba. For information on getting to the University of Manitoba, see: https://umanitoba.ca/about-um/our-campuses/getting-here
This event is co-sponsored by the UM Institute for Humanities, the Centre for Human Rights Research, the Department of History, the Department of Asian Studies, and the Faculty of Arts.
Between the 1870s and 1930s, Americans transformed sexual vice into an international political and humanitarian concern. As social reformers and state officials worked to eradicate prostitution and trafficking, they promoted sexual self-control as the cornerstone of civilization and used the policing of sexuality to justify American interventions around the world.
Eva Payne is a historian of the 19th- and 20th-century U.S. with a focus on women, gender, sexuality, and U.S. empire. She is currently Assistant Professor of History at the University of Mississippi and received a PhD from Harvard University in 2017.
Her first book, Empire of Purity: The History of Americans’ Global War on Prostitution was published by Princeton University Press in 2024.
She is also involved with several public history projects, including the Queer Mississippi Histories Project, which documents and preserves LGBTQ life in Mississippi, and You Should Never Blink, a documentary film about pop artist and nun Corita Kent.
