People
Kate Masur
U.S.; the Civil War and Reconstruction; slave emancipation; citizenship
Office: Harris Hall #227
Phone: 847-491-2849
E-mail: kmasur
northwestern.edu
Kate Masur (PhD University of Michigan 2001) works in nineteenth-century U.S. history, with particular emphasis on how Americans confronted the political and social problems posed by the end of slavery. A faculty affiliate of the Department of African American Studies, she has recently completed her first book, An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, D.C. (University of North Carolina Press, 2010). Professor Masur is also the author of “'A Rare Phenomenon of Philological Vegetation': The Word “Contraband' and the Meanings of Emancipation in the United States," Journal of American History (March 2007), which was named best article of the year in that journal.
Professor Masur’s research has been supported by fellowships from the Library of Congress’s John W. Kluge Center and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The recipient of a 2010 ACLS/Ryskamp fellowship, she is currently working on a new project concerning African Americans, federal employment, and the Republican party in the post-Civil War period. In this research, she is especially interested in government work as a source of economic stability and upward mobility for African Americans, the nineteenth-century Republican party’s struggles with race, and the meanings of federal enclaves in the post-Confederate South. Before joining the Northwestern faculty, she spent two years as an editor at the Freedmen and Southern Society Project at the University of Maryland. She worked on the project's forthcoming volume, Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867, ser. 3, vol. 2: Land and Labor, 1866-1867.
Teaching interests
Professor Masur teaches general courses in U.S. history and more specialized topics such as the Civil War and Reconstruction, Abraham Lincoln, civil rights in the nineteenth century, and comparative emancipations.
northwestern.edu