Previous Goodstein Lecturers

1999 Sara Evans, University of Minnesota (retired); author of Born for Liberty: A History of American Women (Free Press, 1989); Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century's End (Free Press, 2003), Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and The New Left (Vintage Paperback, 1979, 1980); McKnight Distinguished University Professorship, McKnight Humanities Scholar, consulting editor, Journal of American History.

2000, Alice Kessler-Harris, Columbia University; author of In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth Century America (2001); Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (1982); A Woman’s Wage: Historical Meanings and Social Consequences (1990); fellow at the National Humanities Center in Durham, NC and at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

2001, Beverly Guy Sheftall, Spelman College; author of Daughters of Sorrow: Attitudes Toward Black Women, 1880-1920 (Carlson, 1991); Words of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist Thought (New Press, 1995); founding director of the Women’s Research and Resource Center and the Anna Julia Cooper Professor of Women’s Studies; founding co-editor of Sage: A Scholarly Journal of Black Women.

2002, Jacquelyn Hall, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; author of Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women's Campaign Against Lynching (1979, 1993); co-author of Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (1987, 2000); president of Organization of American Historians in 2003-04 and of the Southern Historical Association in 2001-02; founding president of the Labor and Working Class History Association.

2003, Anne Firor Scott, Duke University Emerita; author of The Southern Lady (1970, 1995); Making the Invisible Woman Visible(1984); Natural Allies: Women's Associations in American History (1992); Unheard Voices: The First Historians of Southern Women (1993); former president of Organization of American Historians; received OAH Distinguished Service Award in 2002 and the American Historical Association’s Scholarly Achievement Award in 2008.

2004, Suzanne Lebsock, Rutgers University; author of A Murder in Virginia: Southern Justice on Trial (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003); “A Share of Honour”: Virginia Women, 1600-1945 (Richmond: Virginia Women’s Cultural History Project, 1984); The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784-1860 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1984); member of American Historical Association; Organization of American Historians; Southern Historical Association; Bancroft Prize and Berkshire Conference Prize for The Free Women of Petersburg; Guggenheim Fellowship; MacArthur Fellowship.

2005, Anne Goodwyn Jones, Allegheny College; author of Tomorrow is Another Day, The Woman Writer in the South, 1859-1936 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981); co-author of Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts (University Press of Virginia, 1998); The David Julian and Virginia Suther Whichard Distinguished Professorship in the Humanities, East Carolina University, Greenville NC. Spring 2008; The Maxwell C. Weiner Distinguished Professorship in the Humanities, University of Missouri, Rolla 2003-4.

2006, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Professor Emeritus of History at American University; founder of Sweet Honey in the Rock, the Grammy award-winning African-American female a cappella ensemble; served as the William and Camille Cosby Endowed Chair Professor of Fine Arts for 2002-2004 at Spelman College; Heinz Award for the Arts and Humanities (2003); the Leeway National Award for Women in the Arts (2000); the Presidential Medal for contribution to public understanding of the Humanities (1995); the MacArthur Fellowship (1989).

2007, Farooka Gauhari, author of Searching for Saleem: An Afghan Woman’s Odyssey (1997); Gauhari tells of her desperate attempts to find out what happened to her missing husband, Saleem, and her gradual, painful decision to leave the country with her three children. In a broader sense, her story reflects the harrowing experiences of countless Afghan families: their sufferings and their struggles to maintain their identities under totalitarian rule. Gauhari is the first Afghan woman to publish her memoir in English book form; Gauhari is formerly an associate professor and chair at Kabul University.

2008, Susan Faludi, Harvard graduate; Pulitzer prize-winning journalist; author of The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in an Insecure America (2008); Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (1991); 1992 National Book Critics Circle for Nonfiction; former reporter for The Wall Street Journal; won Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism while at The Wall Street Journal.

2009, Laura Wexler, Yale University; author of Tender Violence: Domestic Visions In An Age of U.S. Imperialism (University of North Carolina Press, 2000); co-author of Pregnant Pictures (Routledge, 2000); Tender Violence was awarded the 2001 annual Joan Kelley Memorial Prize of the American Historical Association for the best book in women’s history.

2010, Miriam Forman-Brunell, University of Missouri; author of Babysitter: An American History (2009); Made to Play House: Dolls and the Commercialization of American Girlhood, 1830-1930 (1993); edited The Story of Rose O’Neill: An Autobiography (1997); received fellowships and research awards from the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, Schlesinger Library, Andrew Mellon Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Smithsonian Institution.

2011, Mia Bay, Rutgers University; associate director of the Rutgers Center for Race and Ethnicity at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis; 2010 Alphonse Fletcher Senior Fellow; author of several publications including The White Image in the Black Mind: African American Ideas about White People 1825-1930 (Oxford University Press, 2000), as well as the recent biography To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells (2009).

2011, Jennifer Glancy, Le Moyne College; as the Catholic Biblical Association Visiting Professor, she has lectured on slavery and the New Testament at École Biblique et Archaéologique Française in Jerusalem; author of Slavery in Early Christianity (Oxford University Press: 2002), a History Book Club selection. Her numerous articles have appeared in Journal of Biblical Literature, Semeia, and Biblical Interpretation.

2012, Susan Ware, educated at Wellesley College and Harvard University; a noted biographer and pioneer in the field of Women's History; she has taught at New York University and Harvard where she served as editor of the biographical dictionary Notable American Women: Completing the Twentieth Century; author of biographies of Amelia Earhart and the 1940s radio star Mary Margaret McBride; her most recent book is Game, Set, Match: Billie Jean King and the Revolution in Women's Sports.

2013, Leslie Reagan, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; professor of history, medicine, gender and women's studies, and law; author of Dangerous Pregnancies: Mothers, Disabilities, and Abortion in Modern America and When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973; current research focuses on Agent Orange film, and activism in the United States and Vietnam.

2014, Jeanne Theoharis, AB in Afro-American Studies from Harvard College and a PhD in American Culture from the University of Michigan; professor of political science at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York; author of The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks; author of numerous books and articles on civil rights and black power movements, the politics of race and education, social welfare and civil rights in post 9/11 America.

2015, Ellen Chesler, honors graduate of Vassar College; Masters and doctoral degrees from Columbia University; a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute; Distinguished Lecturer and Director of the Eleanor Roosevelt Initiative on Women and Public Policy at Roosevelt House, the new public policy institute of Hunter College of the City University of New York; author of Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America and co-editor of Where Human Rights Begin: Health, Sexuality and Women in the New Millennium (Rutgers University Press, 2005); member of the Advisory Committee of the Women's Rights Division of Human Rights Watch.

2017, Catherine Clinton, University of Texas at San Antonio; B.A. from Harvard, M.A. from the University of Sussex, and Ph.D. from Princeton; a Guggenheim Fellow and renowned scholar of Southern women; author or editor of 25 books, including The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old South; The Other Civil War: American Women in the Nineteenth Century; Southern Families at War: Loyalty and Conflict in the Civil War South; and Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom.

2019, Margaret Marsh, Rutgers University; B.A. from Rutgers University–Camden, M.A. and Ph.D. U.S. History, Rutgers University–New Brunswick; an internationally recognized historian of women whose research is focused on the history of infertility, reproductive medicine and reproductive sexuality; author, in collaboration with her sister, Wanda Ronner, MD, of three books, most recently The Pursuit of Parenthood: Reproductive Technology from Test-Tube Babies to Uterus Transplants (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019).

2022, Keisha N. Blain, University of Pittsburgh; B.A. Binghamton University, M.A. and Ph.D. Princeton University; a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow and a Class of 2022 Carnegie Fellow; an award-winning historian and writer with broad interests in 20th century United States, African American History, the modern African Diaspora, and Women’s and Gender Studies; author of the multi-prize-winning book Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (2018); most recently author of Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer's Enduring Message to America (2021).