Crystal Feimster is an associate professor in the departments of African American Studies and History, and in the programs of American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Professor Feimster, a native of North Carolina, is a historian of 19th and 20th century African American history, U.S. Women’s history, and the American South. Her research on racial and sexual violence bridges the fields of social and political history to shed light on long-obscured aspects of the American past. Exploring absences and asymmetries of evidence in the archival record, she draws on the resources of gender studies, critical race theory, literary scholarship, and psychoanalysis to analyze some of the most elusive and traumatic facets of human experience.
Professor Feimster earned her Ph.D. in History from Princeton University and her B.A. in History and Women’s Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of the prizewinning book, Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching, and dozens of articles and book chapters. She has published essays in the New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Slate. Professor Feimster is currently completing two book projects, Truth Be Told: The Battle for Freedom in Civil War Era Louisiana, and Uncivil: Sex and Violence in the Civil War South. Her research has been supported by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Institute for Advanced Study, and other organizations.
Professor Feimster teaches well-subscribed courses on topics including the long civil rights movement, African American women’s history, critical race theory, and the women’s liberation movement. In recognition of her dedication to undergraduate and graduate teaching, Professor Feimster has received multiple awards, including the Poorvu Family Award for Interdisciplinary Teaching (2013), the Provost Teaching Award (2014), the Berkeley College Faculty Mentoring Prize (2015), the Afro-American Cultural Center’s Faculty Excellence Award in Teaching and Mentoring (2017), and the Graduate Mentoring Award in the Humanities (2018).