Rate My Professor Amy Farrell

Amy E. Farrell is the James Hope Caldwell Memorial Chair and Professor of American Studies and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Dickinson College, where she has held the chair since 1991. She earned a B.A. from Ohio University in 1985, an M.A. from the University of Minnesota in 1988, and a Ph.D. in American Studies and Feminist Studies from the University of Minnesota in 1991. Farrell's research centers on representations of gender and feminism in popular culture, the history and representation of the body and fatness, the history of second wave feminism, and girlhood studies. Her scholarly contributions include influential books such as (University of North Carolina Press, 1998), which examines the role of Ms. magazine in advancing popular feminism, and Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture (New York University Press, 2011), exploring cultural stigmas surrounding body size in the United States. She also edited The Contemporary Reader of Gender and Fat Studies (Routledge, 2023) and authored Intrepid Girls: Inside the Girl Scouts' Complicated History (University of North Carolina Press, 2025), detailing the organization's history from 1912 through the 1980s, including its engagements with race, civil rights, feminism, empire, and colonialism.

Farrell has received prestigious awards recognizing her teaching and research excellence, including the Dickinson Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2005-06, an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship in 2019-2020, a fellowship at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute as the Mary Beth and Chris Gordon Fellow in 2021-22, and a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Research Grant in 2023. During her Radcliffe fellowship, she advanced her book on the Girl Scouts. She previously served as executive director of the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Liberal Arts at Dickinson College. As a frequent media commentator, Farrell has appeared on The Colbert Report and contributed to outlets such as NPR, CNN, The New Yorker, Psychology Today, and Bitch magazine, amplifying her impact on public discourse about feminism, body image, and women's history.