Dr. Ruby Oram is an Assistant Professor of Practice at Texas State University where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on US history and public history. She received her PhD from the joint doctoral program in US 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’s forthcoming book, Home Work: Gender, Child Labor, and Education for Girls in Urban America, 1870–1930 (University of Chicago Press, November 2025), explores how public schools evolved to police when and where girls labored in industrial cities during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Using Chicago as a case study, she argues that white women’s groups expanded the regulatory power of public schools to address their social anxieties about women’s wage-earning, sexual delinquency, and domesticity. Oram is currently working on a second book project about women temperance activists and police reform between 1870 and 1920.