Judy Kutulas
Professor of History/American Studies and the Boldt Family Distinguished Teaching Chair in the Humanities
Judy Kutulas was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. After exploring about a half-dozen majors, she settled on history, earning a B.A. with honors and distinction from the University of California at Berkeley, writing an honors thesis on Woodrow Wilson and the Russian Civil War that she still keeps in her office. She earned her master’s and Ph.D. at UCLA in United States history. As a graduate student, she served as a teaching associate, an adviser for at-risk students, and taught courses at Loyola-Marymount University. Her dissertation looked at communities of liberal and radical intellectuals in the 1930s and their debates about communism and the Soviet Union.
Kutulas followed her husband, history professor Michael Fitzgerald, to St. Olaf College in the fall of 1986, teaching an occasional course at the college as well as at the University of St. Thomas until she received a tenure-track appointment in 1990. In her long career at St. Olaf, she has taught courses in history, American Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Film Studies, as well as having been part of the Paracollege and American Conversations program, which she helped to found. She has chaired the history department and directed both the Gender and Sexuality Studies program and American Studies. Next spring she will teach the final American Studies seminar.
Kutulas’s publishing record is as eclectic as her teaching interests. She published her dissertation as The Long War: The Intellectual People’s Front and Anti-Stalinism, 1930–1940 in 1995 with Duke University Press, followed by The American Civil Liberties Union and the Making of American Liberalism, 1930–1960 with the University of North Carolina Press in 2006 and The American Civil Liberties Union and the Making of American Liberalism, 1930–1960, also with the University of North Carolina Press in 2017. She has contributed to several edited volumes and written articles on everything from women’s sports at St. Olaf to singer Carole King. Her current scholarly focus is sitcoms (situation comedies).
She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Newberry Library. She is currently the Boldt Family Distinguished Teaching Chair in the Humanities, for which she writes a blog, “Adventures in the New Humanities,” sampling the many opportunities available for teachers at a liberal arts college.
A resident of Northfield, Kutulas is mother to two adult sons, who grew up in the shadow of Old Main Hill. She is an amateur potter, whose mugs can sometimes be found hanging on the rack in the Cage.
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