Liette Gidlow named distinguished lecturer for the Organization of American Historians

Liette Gidlow is an expert on U.S. politics since the Civil War and focuses on voting rights, women's rights, and African American political activism.

She is at work on her third book, "The Nineteenth Amendment and the Politics of Race," which uncovers connections between the woman suffrage amendment of 1920 and the Black freedom movements of the 1950s and 1960s. She is the author of The Big Vote (2007) which analyzed how massive, non-partisan voter turnout campaigns in the 1920s helped to establish new norms of "expert citizenship" and "consumer citizenship," and of Obama, Clinton, Palin (2012), an essay collection that explores the gendered and racial contexts of the historic 2008 presidential election.

In 2019, Gidlow was the Mellon-Schlesinger Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, where her work for the Long Nineteenth Amendment Project helped mark the woman suffrage centennial. Her research has won the support of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Education. In 2019 she was awarded Wayne State's Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching.

She has presented scholarly and public talks on U.S. politics, woman suffrage, and race at Harvard University, the University of Florida, the Gerald Ford Presidential Museum, the Colorado Historical Society, and elsewhere. Her work has been noted in many media outlets including New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and the BBC.