Lisa G. Materson is professor of US women’s and gender history at the University of California, Davis, and a specialist in US women's political history. Professor Materson's research focuses on women’s involvement in social and political justice movements in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She uses intersectional frameworks to study how ideas about women and gender shaped diverse political strategies and forms of resistance in the US past. ​

Professor Materson's new book Radical Solidarity: Ruth Reynolds, Political Allyship, and the Battle for Puerto Rico’s Independence  will appear with the University of North Carolina Press in December 2024. Radical Solidarity introduces a central figure of US anticolonialism. Reynolds led an extraordinary life. Yet stories of women like her who challenged US colonial exploitation are largely unknown. Such an erasure is a symptom of the marginalization of Puerto Rico more generally—both its politics and its status debates—in US history, as well as the centering of men’s experiences in the history of liberation politics. Excavating Reynolds’s anticolonial activism and the distinct historical contexts in which it was forged not only shifts the gendered center of gravity in liberation politics history, but it also elucidates a powerful model of globally engaged justice activism with enduring relevance beyond Puerto Rico.  

Materson is also the author of For the Freedom of Her Race: Black Women and Electoral Politics in Illinois, 1877–1932 (UNC Press, 2009; paperback, 2013), which analyzes African American women’s turn to the party system at the local and national levels to undermine institutionalized segregation and disfranchisement during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is coeditor, with Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor, of ​​The Oxford Handbook in American Women's and Gender History (OUP, 2018), and the author articles on Puerto Rican women's independence activism and African American women's internationalism. 
 
Materson’s work has been supported by Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History and Princeton University’s Center for the Study of Religion. She is an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer and board member of Women and Social Movements.
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Materson in front of the former La Princesa Prison (San Juan District Jail) that features prominently in chapter 6, "La Princesa," of Radical Solidarity. The site of this notorious prison where Reynolds and Puerto Rican women political prisoners were incarcerated following the 1950 Nationalist Party uprising in Puerto Rico now serves as a tourist office.