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McNally, Deborah

Deborah McNally received her Ph.D. in History in 2013 from the University of Washington, Seattle, where she is currently a lecturer. Her primary field is early American history and the nineteenth-century.  She received her B.A. from the University of Washington in 2003, cum laude with distinction in History, and her M.A. in 2006. Debbie’s interests include slavery, race, gender, and women’s history.  Her dissertation, titled “Within Patriarchy: Gender and Power in Massachusetts’s Congregational Churches, 1630-1730,” addressed the average Puritan woman’s religious experience and complicates both the static concept of patriarchal New England society and the historiography which largely portrays Puritan women as either saints or disorderly sinners. In 2016 she published “To Secure Her Freedom: ‘Dorcas ye blackmore’: Race, Redemption, and the Dorchester First Church,” New England Quarterly 89.4 (Dec., 2016): 533-555.