Scholarship
Dr. Gardner is the author of Qualities of a Citizen (2005), a history of the application of United States immigration and naturalization law to women. In it, she explores how anxieties about morality, family, marriage, poverty, and race structured historical debates over women's citizenship and women's immigration. Her current focus is twofold: the experiences of war brides arriving in the years after World War II, and the efforts of various conservative women's groups to oppose mandatory vaccination in Chicago in the first half of the 20th century.
Teaching
Dr. Gardner teaches classes in United States History, Women's History, United States Constitutional History, and the History of Immigration.