Rate My Professor Lois Kerber

Lois K. Kerber is May Brodbeck Professor in Liberal Arts & Sciences and Professor of History Emerita at The University of Iowa, as well as Lecturer Emerita in the College of Law. She earned an A.B. from Barnard College in 1960 and a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University in 1968. Joining the University of Iowa faculty in 1971, she advanced to full professorship and served as Chair of the Department of History. Kerber held the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professorship of American History at Oxford University during 2006–2007. She has led major historical organizations, including as President of the Organization of American Historians (1996–1997), President of the American Historical Association (2006), and President of the American Studies Association (1988–1989). At the College of Law, she taught courses in Gender and Legal History. Her career encompasses significant committee service, such as membership on the Permanent Committee of the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court of the United States, appointed by President Barack Obama, and roles on the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission and editorial boards including the Journal of Statelessness and Inclusion.

Kerber's research specializations include U.S. women's history, intellectual history, the intersection of gender and legal history, citizenship, and statelessness. Among her key publications are Federalists in Dissent: Imagery and Ideology in Jeffersonian America (Cornell University Press, 1970); Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (University of North Carolina Press, 1980); Toward an Intellectual History of Women: Essays (University of North Carolina Press, 1997); No Constitutional Right to be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (Hill and Wang, 1998); and as co-editor, Women's America: Refocusing the Past (Oxford University Press, ninth edition, 2020). She received the Littleton-Griswold Prize in U.S. legal history and the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize in women's history, both from the American Historical Association in 1998 for No Constitutional Right to be Ladies. Other honors include fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities (three times), the National Humanities Center, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study; election to the American Philosophical Society and Fellowship in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; and the University of Iowa Graduate College Outstanding Mentor Award in the Humanities and Fine Arts. Her American Historical Association presidential address, "The Stateless as the Citizen’s Other: A View from the United States," appeared in the American Historical Review in 2007.