Promoting Student Engagement through Course Policies and Structures

Beverly Gage

John Lewis Gaddis Professor of History and Professor of American Studies

Yale University

Beverly Gage is professor of 20th-century U.S. history. Her courses focus on American politics, government, and social movements.   

Her book G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century, a biography of former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, received the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, the Bancroft Prize in American History, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Biography, the Barbara and David Zalaznick Book Prize in American History, and the Ellis W. Hawley Prize of the Organization of American Historians. G-Man was named a best book of 2022 by the Washington Post, The Atlantic, Publishers Weekly, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Smithsonian. 

Professor Gage is the author of The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in its First Age of Terror, which examined the history of terrorism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, focusing on the 1920 Wall Street bombing. In addition to her teaching and research, she writes for numerous journals and magazines, including The New Yorker, New York Times, and Washington Post.  

In 2009, Professor Gage received the Sarai Ribicoff Award for teaching excellence in Yale College. In 2015, she was elected to serve as the first chair of Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences Senate. From 2017 to 2021, she served as director of Yale’s Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy. In 2021, President Joe Biden nominated her to serve on the National Humanities Council, the advisory board of the National Endowment for the Humanities. 

With Professor Elizabeth Hinton, Professor Gage leads the Workshop in Modern U.S. History, a monthly speaker series for faculty and graduate students to discuss the latest scholarship in 20th-century U.S. history. 

Professor Gage is a graduate of Yale University (1994, BA, American Studies, magna cum laude) and Columbia University (2004, PhD, History).

Crystal Feimster

Associate Professor in the Department of Black Studies and the American Studies Program

Yale University

Crystal N. Feimster is Associate Professor of African American Studies and History and affiliated faculty in American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University, where she also serves as the Harvey Goldblatt Head of Pierson College. A native of North Carolina, she is a historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American history, U.S. women’s history, and the American South. Her scholarship examines racial and sexual violence, bridging social and political history to illuminate long-obscured dimensions of the American past. Attentive to absences and asymmetries in the archive, she draws on gender studies, critical race theory, literary scholarship, and psychoanalysis to interpret some of the most elusive and traumatic facets of human experience.

Professor Feimster earned her Ph.D. in History from Princeton University and her B.A. in History and Women’s Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of the prizewinning Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Harvard University Press), recipient of the W.E.B. Du Bois Book Prize and honorable mention for the Darlene Clark Hine Book Prize. Her award-winning scholarship also includes the article “Keeping a Disorderly House in Civil War Kentucky,” which received the Kentucky Historical Society’s Collins Award for best article in the Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, and “Rape and Mutiny at Fort Jackson: Black Laundresses Testify in Civil War Louisiana,” which received honorable mention for the Letitia Woods Brown Article Prize from the Association of Black Women Historians. She has published widely in leading journals and has written essays for broader audiences in The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Slate. She is currently completing two books, Truth Be Told: The Battle for Freedom in Civil War Era Louisiana and Uncivil: Sex and Violence in the Civil War South.

Her professional appointments reflect her leadership in the field. She is President of the Southern Association of Women’s Historians, a member of the Executive Board of the Society of American Historians, Associate Editor of Civil War History, and Contributing Editor to Labor. She previously served as Co-President of the Coordinating Council for Women in History and has held numerous leadership roles in national scholarly organizations.

Her research has been supported by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Institute for Advanced Study, and other distinguished institutions. A devoted and award-winning teacher, Professor Feimster offers well-subscribed courses on the Long Civil Rights Movement, African American Women’s History, Critical Race Theory, and the Women’s Liberation Movement. In recognition of her commitment to undergraduate and graduate mentorship, she has received multiple honors, including the Poorvu Family Award for Interdisciplinary Teaching, the Yale Provost Teaching Prize, the Berkeley College Faculty Mentoring Prize, the Afro-American Cultural Center’s Faculty Excellence Award in Teaching and Mentoring, and the Graduate Mentoring Award in the Humanities.

Charles Bailyn

The A. Bartlett Giamatti Professor of Astronomy and Physics

Yale University

CV

Research Areas: 

Astrophysics & Cosmology

Research Type: 

Experimentalist

Current Projects: 

Observations of stellar mass blackholes, SMARTS consortium

My research focusses on observations of stellar mass black holes and related topics. I serve as the Principal Scientist of the SMARTS consortium, and President of the Board of WIYN Inc.

• Membership  in Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering (2011)

Click here for list of publications.