Faculty and Staff
Kathryn J. Oberdeck
Associate Professor of History
Professor Oberdeck specializes in U.S. cultural and intellectual history, popular culture, working-class culture, gender, cultural criticism and cultural studies, social thought and social movements, and social theory. Her current research focuses on cultural conflicts over the meaning of space and place in twentieth-century America. Her book, The Evangelist and the Impresario: Religion, Entertainment, and Cultural Politics in America, 1884-1914 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999) examines connections between popular religion, popular theater, and class conflict in turn-of-the-century America. Other selected publications include "From Model Town to Edge City: Piety, Paternalism and the Politics of Urban Planning in the United States," Journal of Urban History, 26,4, (May 2000), 508-518 and "Popular Narrative and Working-Class Identity: Alexander Irvine's Early-Twentieth-Century Literary Adventures," in E. Arneson, J. Greene and B. Laurie, eds. Labor Histories: Class, Politics, and the Working-Class Experience (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1998). Professor Oberdeck received her doctorate from Yale University in 1991.