Institute for Research in the Humanities

Sierra Rooney

Position title: Universities of Wisconsin Fellow (2025–2026)

Pronouns: she/her

Address:
Associate Professor, Art, UW–La Crosse

This is a headshot of a woman with brown hair wearing a green jacket.

Monumental Women: Gender, Representation, and the Heroic Ideal in the United States

Monumental Women: Gender, Representation, and the Heroic Ideal in the United States will be the first book and accompanying digital resource to survey the more than 400 monuments to historic women in the United States.

Combining an open-access database, digital maps, and book, Monumental Women will trace the chronology of commemoration of women and the evolving ways that Americans visualize, honor, and interpret historical women through monuments created for public spaces. This project reveals how monuments to women reflect complex and contested negotiations around issues of gender norms and cultural understandings of American heroism.

Dr. Sierra Rooney is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse, specializing in art of the United States, particularly public monuments and commemorations of women. She is co-editor of the volume Teachable Monuments: Using Public Art to Spark Dialogue and Confront Controversies (Bloomsbury, 2021). She has been published in Panorama, Public Art Dialogue, De Arte, Journal of Urban History, among others, and her commentary has been featured in outlets including, Wisconsin Public Radio, USA Today, and Axios.