Judy Kutulas  
Professor of History
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 attended the University of California at Berkeley as an undergraduate, starting out as a Design major and graduating with a degree in History.  I wrote my honors thesis on Woodrow Wilson and the Russian Civil War.  I entered graduate school at UCLA in the midst of a recession.  At orientation, the graduate adviser cheerfully warned us that there were no jobs in History.  I persisted through the twists and turns of a graduate degree, loving a process a lot of people find difficult or tedious or just too long.  I loved the intellectual stimulation and the lifestyle; plus, it was at UCLA that I met and married Michael Fitzgerald.  My dissertation looked at radical intellectuals of the 1930s.  When I graduated, I had a new spouse, a decent resume, a modest amount of student debt, and no job.

I followed Michael Fitzgerald to St. Olaf College and, eventually, we both got full-time tenured jobs here.  I published a revised version of my dissertation in 1995 as The Long War: The Intellectual People’s Front and Anti-Stalinism, 1930-1940 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 looks at the culture of the 1970s and the ways it mainstreamed a commodified version of 1960s revolutions, the first piece of which appeared in the December 2010 issue of the Journal of American History.During my recent sabbatical, I completed a draft of the manuscript.

I teach in the History Department and the American Studies program, along with American Conversations and, on occasion, the Media and Film Studies program.  I am the director of the Women’s Studies Program and the head of the Schelske Opportunity Grants fund.  Michael Fitzgerald and I are parents to two young adult sons, Alex and Nate.  In my free time, I can be found in my kitchen (latest success: cheese soufflé!), on a potter’s wheel at the Northfield Arts Guild, at the Northfield Food Shelf, out running, or maybe traveling.  I also indulge 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.