Deanna McGuckin Bio

Deanna McGuckin is a fourth year PhD student studying history at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois.  She earned her MA in History May 9, 2020, and her BS in Secondary Education May 13, 1999.  Deanna’s areas of research include British History, British Culture, World War Two Social History, Women’s Studies, History of Alternative Economies, Immigration History, History of the Home, History of Housing, Council Housing, and Public Housing.  She has served as a TA in the Southern Illinois University History Department from 2019 to the present.  

  

Deanna delivered a presentation titled, Housewives: Doing Much More Than Putting On The Kettle: Housewives, Rationing, and the Black Market During and After World War Two, at the North American Conference on British Studies on November 13, 2022 in Chicago, Illinois.  This presentation was based on her MA thesis titled, Gray and Slightly Dirty White Laundry: Housewives, Rationing, and the Black Market During and After the Second World War in England.  After earning her BS, she taught for two years as a high school teacher at Horace Mann High School in Gary, Indiana, she then became a stay-at-home mom for fourteen years.  Because of her time at home, she brings a unique perspective to the study of housewives.  She also attended the American Historical Association’s 2022 conference in New Orleans, and is a member of Phi Alpha Theta, the historical honor society.  She is currently a Dissertation Research Assistantship Award recipient at Southern Illinois University.

 

Deanna is a first-generation college graduate; her mother had a high school diploma, and her father never finished the eighth grade.  She is a non-traditional student, completing her BS as a mother of two, and twenty-one years later, her MA as a mother of four and grandmother of one.  She is currently completing her PhD.

 

Deanna has acted as co-leader in 2022, 2023, and 2024 on study abroad trips to England and is currently anticipating another trip in May 2025.  She enjoys sharing her love of travel with students, especially students who have not had the privilege of travel in the past.  Her background as a first-generation BS, MA and future PhD drives her to reach out and help other first-generation students.  She is passionate about encouraging prospective first-generation students to pursue higher education, emphatically believing gender, race, and social class should never be seen as a barrier to continuing education.  

 

Deanna is currently researching and writing her dissertation for her PhD.  She is researching US/UK marriage from the last 1800's to the present.  She plans on conducting several interviews with people who have been part of a US/UK marriage, and will add these interviews to the historical scholarship, in which oral history has been either absent or severely underrepresented.  

 

Upon completing of her PhD, Deanna wants to teach either at a university or a high school.  She plans on continuing taking students abroad and encouraging prospective first-generation college students to pursue higher education.  She also plans on completing an additional MA in Curriculum and Instruction after earning her PhD because she believes learning is a lifelong process.