A lot of you love Legally Blonde. I mean really love Legally Blonde. So it was probably inevitable that two of my closest friends in the profession, Kristalyn Shefveland and Jennifer McCutchen, requested to do a pod on this film if only to torment me. This movie is so much more than I ever gave it credit for. We get into this film as a historical artifact, perhaps the last film of the 90s, it has so much to say about shattering glass ceilings, East Coast vs West Coast, fashion, performative perceptions, whether or not it's ok to be a fan of pop culture, and yes, why I seem to be drawn to attorneys. This pod is a blast and I hope you dig it.
About our guests:
Kristalyn Shefveland is an Associate Professor of American History at the University of Southern Indiana in Evansville where she teaches classes on the American South, Indigenous and Settler relationships from the colonial era to the present, the American Revolution, and the Atlantic World. Her current research project is a book on historical memory of indigenous peoples in Florida, particularly the town of Vero Beach, on the Indian River. She is also working with students and communities on a local history project- River Cities Oral History- that seeks to capture stories and popular memory of the Ohio and Wabash River Valley settlements.
Jennifer McCutchen is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of St. Thomas. She specializes in Early American History and Native History, with a focus on the themes of gender, power, exchange, and diplomacy. Her current project is an ethnohistorical study of gunpowder in the late eighteenth-century Creek Confederacy.