Judy Kutulas  

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

I grew up in a large, loud Greek-American family in the San Francisco Bay Area, smack in the midst of all the cultural and political turbulence of the Sixties.  I was a Brownie, a Girl Scout, a member of my high school student council, and the first – and so far as I know only – student representative on the Pleasant Hill Planning Commission.  I attended Berkeley as an undergraduate, writing a 96-page honors thesis on Woodrow Wilson and the Russian Civil War.  I entered graduate school in UCLA to study German History, switched to US History in the first week, and have never doubted my ability to grow into a new field ever since.  My dissertation was a social history of radical intellectuals in the 1930s.  I met my spouse, Michael Fitzgerald, in graduate school when we shared an office for teaching assistants.  He stole my pencils and my sweatshirt.  I still haven’t quite forgiven him.

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 a second book, The American Civil Liberties Union and the Transformation of American Liberalism in 2006.  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 and the ways it mainstreamed a commodified version of 1960s revolutions.

I teach History, American Studies, Women’s Studies, and Film Studies classes.  I am the Director of Women’s Studies and American Studies, the head of the Student Life Committee, the president of the Schelske Opportunity Grant Fund, and a founder of both Media and Film Studies on campus.  I am, in short, the quintessential over-extender.  I have two teenage sons, Alex and Nate, and five teenage nieces and nephews, so I am much in demand as a consultant on all matters collegiate.  In my spare time I run, read, cook, and engage in cultural research, which other people might call watching TV and films, reading magazines, and listening to music.  I believe that our culture is one big research opportunity that everyone should consider critically and thoughtfully and that is a viewpoint I always try to bring into each course I teach.