Kathryn Schumaker is an associate professor of History and was awarded the Edith Kinney Presidential Professorship in 2018. Her teaching and research focus on race and the law in the 20th century United States. She received her PhD in History from the University of Chicago. Her first book, Troublemakers: Students' Rights and Racial Justice in the Long 1960s (New York University Press, 2019) examined how Black and Chicano student activism led to the establishment of the constitutional rights of all students in American public schools. Schumaker has also published shorter articles in essays in Ohio Valley History, the Oxford Encyclopedia of American History, the Annals of Iowa, the Middle West Review, and the Washington Post. Her research has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Society for Legal History, and the American Historical Association. In 2016-2017, Schumaker was a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow.
Professor Schumaker is currently at work on two new book projects. The first is an exploration of the rise of the color line in Mississippi told through one interracial family's history. Schumaker is also at work on a long history of corporal punishment in American public schools.
