Amy Kittelstrom

Professor Kittelstrom is a historian of modern thought and culture with specialties in American democracy and religion, African-American literature, and global sport. While earning her B.A. at Rice University (1994), she spent a semester at the University of Melbourne in Australia, which introduced her to post-colonial studies. She earned her PhD in History at Boston University in 2004, where she was a Presidential Fellow. Her dissertation was supported by a fellowship from the Center for Religion and American Life at Yale University, and the process of turning it into a book was supported by the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University and the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University.

She served for three years as a lecturer in the History and Literature program at Harvard University and one semester at a Clemente College for low-income adults before coming to Sonoma State in 2007. She teaches American history from pre- Columbus to the present as well as upper-division courses in her areas of expertise. Her book, The Religion of Democracy: Seven Liberals and the American Moral Tradition, was published by Penguin in 2015. She has published essays and reviews in a variety of venues including Modern Intellectual History, the Journal of American History, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Washington Post, and Black Perspectives. She is currently working on a manuscript entitled This Division in Our House: James Baldwin and the Myth of America.