Rappaport, Erika

Affiliated Faculty

Education: 

Ph.D. Rutgers University, 1993

I am a European cultural historian, focused in particular on the history of gender and consumer cultures in Modern Britain and its Empire. I am especially interested in the ways in which particular commodities and shopping spaces are integral to the construction of identities in the 19th and 20th centuries. My recent work seeks to reposition the British Empire within a broader global framework. I enjoy teaching comparative histories of gender, consumerism, urban history, Empires and globalization.

Contact

Office: 

HSSB 4253

Office Hours: 

By appointment only

FAX: 

(805) 893-8795

Email: 

rappaport@history.ucsb.edu

Mailing Address: 

English Department
UC Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3170

Publications

Articles & Chapters: 

  • Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London's West End
    Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000
  • Packaging China: Foreign Articles and Dangerous Tastes in the Mid-Victorian Tea Party
    in The Making of the Consumer: Knowledge, Power and Identity in the Modern World, edited by Frank Trentmann (Oxford: Berg, 2006): 125-46.
  • ‘The Bombay Debt’: Letter Writing, Domestic Economies and Family Conflict in Colonial India
    Gender and History 16, no. 2 (August 2004): 233-260. Winner of the Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies Biannual Article Prize.
  • Art, Commerce, or Empire? The Rebuilding of Regent Street, 1880-1927
    History Workshop Journal 53 (Spring 2002): 96-119
  • “Travelling in the Lady Guide’s London: Consumption, Modernity and the Fin-de-Siècle Metropolis”
    in Meanings of Modernity: Britain from Late-Victorian Times to World War Two, edited by Martin Daunton and Bernhard Reiger (New York and London: Berg Publishers and New York University Press, 2001)
  • “Acts of Consumption: Musical Comedy and the Desire of Exchange”
    in Cathedrals of Consumption: The European Department Store 1850-1939, edited by Geoffrey Crossick and Serge Jaumain (London: Ashgate, 1999)
  • “‘A Husband and His Wife's Dresses’: Consumer Credit and the Debtor Family in England, 1864-1914”
    in The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective, edited by Victoria de Grazia and Ellen Furlough (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996)
  • ‘The Halls of Temptation’: Gender, Politics, and the Construction of the Department Store in Late-Victorian London
    Journal of British Studies 35 (January 1996): 58-83
  • ‘A New Era of Shopping': The Promotion of Women's Pleasure in London's West End, 1909-1914
    in Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, edited by Leo Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995)