Ruth Feldstein

Research Interests: United States history, with a focus on 20th-century transnational culture and politics, women's and gender history, and African American history.  

Ruth Feldstein is Professor of History and American Studies at Rutgers University, Newark. Her scholarship and teaching bring together women’s and gender history, African American history, and cultural history across borders. She teaches undergraduate courses on the history of US Popular Culture, the civil rights movement, and Black women’s history (among others) and graduate seminars on the history of Cultural History, Transnational
Cultural History, Introduction to American Studies, and African American history. She is the author of Motherhood in Black and White: Race and Sex in American Liberalism, 1930-1965, an intellectual and cultural history of liberalism from the New Deal to the Great Society, and the award-winning How It Feels to Be Free: Black Women Entertainers and the Civil Rights Movement, which tells the story of six Black women performers and their critical importance to both the civil rights movement and women’s liberation. She was associate producer for the Emmy-nominated documentary, How It Feels to Be Free, based on her book.