Monica L. Mercado is Assistant Professor of History at Colgate University in upstate New York, affiliated with Women’s Studies and Museum Studies. She teaches courses on US women’s and gender history, the history of sexuality, public history, and in the University’s core curriculum. Her research centers on questions of women’s education, girlhood, and religion in nineteenth- and twentieth-century North America, and the role of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies in developing contemporary US public history sites and curricula. A contributor to the group blog Religion in American History, her writings can be also found in U.S. Catholic Historian and the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Religion and Race. She is currently at work on a book manuscript, tentatively titled The Young Catholic: Girlhood and the Making of American Catholicism. Mercado serves on the American Historical Association’s Committee on Gender Equity and the New York State History Advisory Group. She has a BA from Barnard College and an AM and PhD in US History from the University of Chicago.