About

Kathleen Fitzgerald is a Teaching Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She serves as the Director of the Social & Economic Justice program. Her areas of interest include race, white privilege, gender, sexuality, sexual violence, social movements, and food justice. She is involved in teaching and research related to these topics, contributing to the department's focus on social justice issues.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Computer Science
• Aesthetics
• Criminology
• Art

Selected publications

• Nice White Ladies: The Truth About White Supremacy, Our Role in It, and How We can Help Dismantle It

  UNC Libraries · 2025-05-08

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Book review of "Nice White Ladies: The Truth About White Supremacy, Our Role in It, and How We can Help Dismantle It"

  PublisherDOI

• A Book of One’s Own

  Petits Propos Culinaires · 2025-05-13

  articleSenior author

  In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf describes women authors in eighteenth-century Britain as ‘obscure [. . .] I wish we knew more’ about them. Her remark is applicable not only to the cookbook authors discussed in Gilly Lehmann’s The British Housewife but also to nineteenth-century American cookbook authors. This article contains the first biographical sketches of three American authors: Mrs A.L. Webster, ‘Mrs Bliss of Boston’, and Mrs S.G. Knight. Their work has attracted modern attention, but their identities have remained obscure. Mrs A.L. Webster was Ann Lockwood (Francis) Webster, wife of Ira Webster, co-publisher of later editions of Webster’s The Improved Housewife. ‘Mrs Bliss of Boston’, author of The Practical Cook Book, was probably Jeannette Frances (Root) Bliss, wife of Rev. Seth Bliss, an official of the American Tract Society. Mrs S.G. Knight was Susan Glover (Broughton) Knight, author of both Tit-Bits: Or, How to Prepare a Nice Dish at Moderate Expense and pious fiction for young people. Historians have debated whether explicit feminism represents a break from the emergence of authoritative female voices in the domestic sphere or has been built upon such domestic autonomy. They have also debated whether publication of any kind by women, including cookbooks, was ‘transgressive’ or whether female domestic publications were merely another form of patriarchal subordination. We side with those arguing that domestic autonomy and publications demonstrating domestic expertise sowed some of the seeds of explicit feminism. Virginia Woolf’s insight about great literature, that it is ‘the outcome of many years [. . .] of thinking by the body of the people’ is true, we think, of movements such as feminism. Knowing more about these three ‘obscure women of the past’ means giving them their due as contributors to ‘thinking by the body of the people’. This is the first of two articles about Mrs A.L. Webster, ‘Mrs Bliss of Boston’, and Mrs S.G. Knight. The second article will focus on their works in the context of their times.

  PublisherDOI

• Review of “Is It Racist? Is It Sexist? Why Red and Blue White People Disagree, and How to Decide in the Gray Areas”

  Social Forces · 2025-07-08

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• My Analyst Has Dementia, I Might Need a Donut

  Psychoanalytic Inquiry · 2024-09-19

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• :<i>Indigenous Memory, Urban Reality: Stories of American Indian Relocation and Reclamation</i>

  American Journal of Sociology · 2024-06-17

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Housing

  2023-04-11

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Race Relations in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

  2023-04-11

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Race in the Cultural Imagination

  2023-04-11

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Emergence of the US Racial Hierarchy

  2023-04-11

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Race Relations in Flux

  2023-04-11

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Keith Stavely

  Film Independent

  2 shared

• Keith W. F. Stavely

  1 shared

• Diane M. Rodgers

  Northern Illinois University

  1 shared

• Kandice L. Grossman

  1 shared