Research Interests
Professor Donohue is primarily interested in the ways in which Americans make sense of their political world. Her first book, Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Idea of the Consumer (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), looked at the role that American ideas about the producer and the consumer played in transforming free-market liberalism into its more activist modern counterpart. Her current book project, "Information Wars: The Public's Right to Know and the Making of Modern America," for which she received both a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and a Theodore Sorenson Research Fellowship, examines the ways in which the politics and political discourse surrounding the public's right to know shaped public policy and ideas about democracy, citizenship and governance between 1945 and 1990. In addition to "Information Wars," she is currently at work on an edited collection entitled "Liberty and Justice for All: Rethinking Politics in Cold War America" and has just completed an article entitled "The Politics of Place: Privatization and the Emergence of Modern American Conservatism."

Recent Publications
Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Idea of the Consumer (Johns Hopkins Press, 2003).

"What Gender is the Consumer? The Role of Gender Connotations in Defining the Political," Journal of American Studies (1999).

"From Cooperative Commonwealth to Capitalist Democracy: The Cooperative Ideal in America, 1880-1940," in Labor, Class and Consumption: Consumer Cooperation in Europe and the United States, 1840-1950, ed. Ellen Furlough and Carl Stikwerda (Rowman & Liftlefield, 1999).