Faculty Profile for Dr. Ruby Oram

Biography Section

Biography and Education

Dr. Ruby Oram is an Assistant Professor of Practice at Texas State University where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on U.S. history and public history. She received her PhD from the joint doctoral program in U.S. and Public History at Loyola University Chicago in 2020. She is a social historian of American women and gender, labor, education, and urban reform movements of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She co-coordinates the Public History Graduate Concentration and serves as Internship Director for the Texas Center for Public History.

Oram held several positions as a public historian prior to arriving at Texas State University. She worked in collections and museum education at the Art Institute of Chicago; archives and record management at the Newberry Library, and public programs at the Chicago Architecture Center (formerly the Chicago Architecture Foundation). In 2011 she helped run the first Open House Chicago, an annual architecture festival that provides free access to hundreds of historic buildings and cultural sites in Chicago. Her current public history practice focuses on historic preservation and community-based site interpretation to highlight inclusive stories in the built environment. She frequently collaborates with students and members of the Travis County Historical Commission to document forgotten historic sites in central Texas.

Oram’s first book, Home Work: Gender, Child Labor, and Education for Girls in Urban America, 1870-1930 (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming in Fall 2025), explores how public schools evolved to police when and where girls labored in industrial cities. Using Chicago as a case study, she argues that women’s groups expanded the regulatory power of public schools to address social anxieties about women, wage-earning, and domesticity. Oram has published on gender, labor, and urban school reform in The Journal of Urban History, The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and A Girl Can Do: Recognizing and Representing Girlhood (ed. Tiffany Isselhardt). She is currently pursuing National Register status for several twentieth-century public schools in Chicago that represent important chapters in the history of urban education. Oram is also working on her second book project about America’s first state prisons for women.

More information about her teaching, scholarship, and public history projects can be found on her personal website: www.rubyoram.com

Teaching Interests

U.S. History; Public History

Research Interests

19th and 20th Century U.S. History; Public History; Local History; Women's and Gender History; Urban History; History of Education; Urban History; History of Social Movements