Kirsten Fischer

My research projects and the courses I teach tend to change over time.  My first book, Suspect Relations: Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina (Cornell University Press, 2002), explores changing ideas about racial difference in an 18th-century slave society.  The book shows that the way neighbors and court magistrates either punished or ignored illicit sexual relationships, especially between white and Black partners, reinforced the relatively new legal definitions of racial difference.  My second book is American Freethinker: Elihu Palmer and the Struggle for Religious Freedom in the New Nation (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021).  In the 1790s, Elihu Palmer combined cutting-edge science with eastern religious practices to argue that everything is made of the same shared matter.  This insight, he thought, could produce social equality without revolutionary violence, but his detractors considered him an infidel and a danger to the new United States.  My current book project is a hybrid family history/memoir about my father's family in 20th-century Germany.  

I love to teach, and in April 2011 I was honored to receive the Horace T. Morse - University of Minnesota Alumni Association Award for Outstanding Contributions to Undergraduate Education.  In 2025, I received the student-nominated Arthur "Red" Motley Exemplary Teaching Award.  I also enjoy living and teaching in other countries.  In 2008-2009 and in 2011–12, I enjoyed being a visiting scholar at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies, University of Heidelberg, Germany.  I taught as a visiting professor at the Sorbonne University in Paris in 2023, and at the University of Graz, Austria, in 2025.  I am a visiting scholar at the University of Helsinki in fall 2026 and a Fulbright fellow at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, Poland, in spring 2027.