Kathryn Nasstrom

Kathryn Nasstrom

Professor

Faculty Emeritus
Kalmanovitz Hall 358
Socials

Biography

Kathryn Nasstrom teaches in the U.S. field and specializes in civil rights history, women’s history, oral history, and memory & narrative studies. She received her PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1993 and has been at USF since 1994.

She is the author of Everybody's Grandmother and Nobody's Fool: Frances Freeborn Pauley and the Struggle for Social Justice (Cornell University Press, 2000), and she has published in the Journal of American History and the Oral History Review, among other journals. She is also the editor of the Oral History Review and a series editor for Oxford University Press's oral history book series. Her current research is on autobiographies of the civil rights movement, and she is completing a book manuscript on the autobiographical literature on the Little Rock school desegregation crisis.

Appointments

  • Editor, The Oral History Review, 2012-present
  • Chair, Department of History, University of San Francisco, 2012-2014, 2016-2017
  • Director, Gender and Sexualities Studies Program, University of San Francisco, 2004- 2006
  • Director, Women’s Studies Program, University of San Francisco, 2002-2004
  • Acting Director, Southern Oral History Program, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1993-94

Awards & Distinctions

  • National Endowment for the Humanities Chair, University of San Francisco, 2001-2002
  • National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, 1997-98
  • Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and Public Policy, Resident Fellow, Spring 1997

Selected Publications

  • Everybody's Grandmother and Nobody's Fool: Frances Freeborn Pauley and the Struggle for Social Justice, Cornell University Press, 2000.
  • Frances Freeborn Pauley: Working for Justice in Twentieth-Century Georgia,” in Georgia Women: Their Lives and Times, volume II, eds. Ann Short Chirhart and Kathleen Clark, University of Georgia Press, 2013, 212-235.
  • Between Memory and History: Autobiographies of the Civil Rights Movement and the Writing of Civil Rights History,” Journal of Southern History LXXIV (May 2008): 325-64.
  • This Joint Effort’: Women and Community Organizing in Vine City in the 1960s,” Atlanta History: A Journal of Georgia and the South 48 (Spring 2006): 28-44.
  • Pushing the Boundaries in Oral History-Based Biographies: A Commentary,” Oral History Review 32 (Summer/Fall 2005): 77-81.
  • Frances Freeborn Pauley: Using Autobiography and Biography to Interpret a White Woman’s Activist Identity,” in Throwing Off the Cloak of Privilege: White Southern Women Activists in the Civil Rights Era, ed. Gail S. Murray, University of Florida Press, 2004, 75-100.
  • El activismo por los derechos civiles como construction de la identidad de una mujer blanca en Georgia,” Historia, Antropologia y Fuentes Orales 29 (2003): 123-142.
  • Beginnings and Endings: Life Stories and the Periodization of the Civil Rights Movement,” Journal of American History 86 (September 1999): 700-711.
  • "Down to Now: Memory, Narrative, and Women's Leadership in the Civil Rights Movement in Atlanta, Georgia,” Gender & History 11 (April 1999): 113-144.
  • Awarded the 2000 A. Elizabeth Taylor Prize of the Southern Association for Women Historians for the best article on southern women’s history.
  • Reprinted in The Civil Rights Movement in United States Memory, eds. Renee Romano and Leigh Raiford, University of Georgia Press, 2006, 253-289.
  • More Was Expected of Us’: The North Carolina League of Women Voters and the Feminist Movement in the 1920s,” North Carolina Historical Review LXVIII (July 1991): 307-319.