Anna Kaplan Professorial Lecturer History
- Degrees
- PhD, History with Public History concentration, American University
MA, Oral History, Columbia University
MA, Anthropology, Columbia University
BA, Anthropology, Folklore and Creative Writing minors, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill - Bio
- Anna Kaplan researches and teaches 20th Century US history and public history. Her focus is memory and the creation and uses of public narratives about race, particularly African American, white, and Indigenous dynamics in the US South. She is working on a manuscript examining how Oxford, MS, communities and the university constructs and employs stories about the University of Mississippi’s desegregation in 1962. She is also researching the erased history of Black women’s contributions to early institutional oral history programs. She has worked on oral history projects for the US Department of State, the National Park Service, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Smithsonian Institution's Archives of American Art, and more local DC community organizations. She was one of the founders of the DC Oral History Collaborative and continues to develop and lead community workshops for the program. In addition, Anna serves as the President of Oral History in the Mid-Atlantic Region and on the Nominating Committee for the Oral History Association. She is a 2023-2024 HistoryMakers Faculty Innovations in Pedagogy and Teaching Fellow. Her article “Everyday Activism: How Local Black Residents Shaped the University of Mississippi and Oxford in the Mid-20th Century” is forthcoming in 2024 in the journal Study the South.
- For the Media
- To request an interview for a news story, call AU Communications at 202-885-5950 or submit a request.
Teaching
Spring 2024
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HIST-100 Hist, Memory, Changeable Past
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HIST-100 Hist, Memory, Changeable Past
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HIST-220 Women in America since 1850
Fall 2024
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CORE-105 Complex Problems Seminar: What is the South?
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HIST-467 Oral History
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WGSS-150 Women's Voices Thru Time