Crystal N. Feimster

Crystal N. Feimster, a native of North Carolina, is an Associate Professor in the Departments of African American Studies and History and the Programs of American Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. She earned her Ph. D. in History from Princeton University and her BA in History and Women’s Studies from UNC-Chapel Hill.  Feimster has also taught at Boston College, UNC-Chapel Hill, and Princeton.  She teaches a range of courses in 19^th and 20^th century African American history, women’s history, and southern history. “The Long Civil Rights Movement” and “Critical Race Theory” are her most popular undergraduate courses at Yale. Feimster has received numerous teaching and mentoring awards and is an OAH Distinguished Lecturer.  She has been a faculty fellow at the American Academy of Art Science in Cambridge, MA, the Dubois Institute at Harvard, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, and Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

Feimster is the author of Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Harvard, 2009), a history of how black and white women in the US South were affected by and responded to the problems of rape and lynching in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Southern Horrors won the North East Black Studies Association 2010 W.E.B. Du Bois Book Prize and received Honorable Mention for the Organization of American Historians’ 2010 Darlene Clark Hine Award.  Feimster has published peer-reviewed essays in The Journal of American History and Daedalus, has co-edited a special issue of The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era on Centennial Anniversary of Woman’s Suffrage, and has written numerous book chapters and encyclopedia entries. Her essay “Keeping a Disorderly House in Civil War Kentucky,” in the Register of the Kentucky Historical Society was awarded the Kentucky Historical Society Collins Award for best article in 2019. Feimster has also published in the New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Slate and has advised and appeared in several documentaries, such as The Rape of Recy Taylor.

Feimster is currently completing Truth Be Told: The Battle for Freedom in Civil War Era Louisiana (Oxford University Press, forthcoming), a case study that centers Louisiana as part of a formative moment in the emergence of new ideas about freedom and citizenship in America.  She is  also working on a manuscript titled, Beauty and Booty: The History of Civil War Rape.