Karen W. Tice is an associate professor of educational policy studies and evaluation who teaches courses in gender and education, popular culture, gender, social reform, and activism, and feminist theory. Her publications include Tales of Wayward Girls: Case Records and the Professionalization of Social Work (Illinois, 1998) which examined the construction of professional authority in social work and how the writing of case narratives by white middle-class women reformers in their interactions with working class and immigrant women created clients and authorities, as well as discourses of racialized and classed deviancy and normality.

In addition to articles on gender and social reform, she has published articles in Feminist Studies, Journal of Women’s History, Gender & Society,Feminist Teacher, and Genders and book chapters in edited collections including Mediating Faiths: Religion, Media, and Popular Culture on feminist activism, beauty pageants and higher education, beauty pageants in the mountain south, born-again Christian beauty queens, and Reality TV makeover shows.

She is currently completing a book manuscript “Queens of Academe: Beauty, Bodies, and Campus Life, 1920-Present,” on campus beauty pageants and students cultures on historically black and predominantly white college campuses in the United States to explore campus body politics and cultural identities.