Kirsten Fischer

My diverse scholarly interests shape my book projects and the courses I teach.  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.  Using court records and travel literature, the book shows that the way neighbors and court magistrates either punished or ignored illicit sexual relationships made race seem increasingly real.  My second book is American Freethinker: Elihu Palmer and the Struggle for Religious Freedom in the New Nation (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021).  Elihu Palmer combined cutting-edge science with eastern religious practices to reconceptualize the make-up of the natural world and humankind's place in it.  He believed these insights would bring about social equality without revolutionary violence, but his detractors considered him an apostate and a danger to the new United States.  Although an early Americanist by training, my research and teaching include much 20th-century history as well.  My current book project is a hybrid family history/memoir about my father's German family in 20th-century Germany.  My courses include "Radical Environmentalism in the US," "Religion and the American Culture Wars," and "History through Memoir."  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 2011–12, I was a Fulbright scholar at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies, University of Heidelberg, Germany.