Judy Kutulas  

Judy Kutulas

Professor of History
Director of American Studies
Director of Women's Studies
American Conversations Lead Teacher 2006-2008
Ph.D., UCLA 1986
20th-century America,
women's history, popular culture
x3236
kutulas@stolaf.edu


I was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, smack in the midst of all the cultural and political turbulence of the Sixties. I am the product of two public universities, the University of California at Berkeley, where I earned my BA in History, and UCLA, where I earned my masters' and PhD degrees. Although I entered graduate school interested in diplomatic history, I ended up studying 20th century US history. My dissertation was a social history of radical intellectuals in the 1930s. To support myself in graduate school, I was a teaching assistant (where I met Professor Fitzgerald), a research assistant, an academic advisor to at-risk students, and the entire office staff of the Holmby-Westwood Property Owners Association, which is how I came to be technically employed by both Aaron Spelling and Hugh Hefner.

I began my Olaf life as a faculty spouse, but soon graduated to temporary and part-time instructor and, finally, professor in my own right, teaching classes on the 20th century and women's history. I published a revised version of my dissertation in 1995 and just this fall published my second book, The American Civil Liberties Union and the Transformation of American Liberalism. I have also published essays, mostly on gender and popular culture, in Impossible to Hold: Women and Culture in the 1960s, Disco Divas: Women and Popular Culture in the 1970s, and The Sitcom Reader: America Viewed and Skewed. My next project is a look at the popular culture of the 1970s as the ways it mainstreamed a commodified version of 1960s revolutions.

I teach History, American Studies, Women's Studies, and Media Studies classes. I am the Director of Women's Studies, Director of American Studies, head the campus's Committee on the Status of Women, the 2006/08 American Conversations lead teacher, and a founder of the Media Studies concentration. I am still married to Michael Fitzgerald and we have two teenage sons, Alex and Nate. In my spare time I run, bike, read, and watch TV, or as it's known in my house, research. In fact, I try to look at life as one very large cultural research opportunity and my biggest goal as a teacher is to get my students to be thoughtful observers of culture even as they participate in it.