Kate Kushner (she/her) is a History PhD candidate at Princeton studying southern and African American history. Her dissertation explores the history of governance in the South by examining the government’s attempts to regulate violence in Richmond, Virginia, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Broadly speaking, Kate is interested in how different levels of government have developed the capacity to exercise power and how southerners of different races, genders, and classes have conceived of the proper role of the government in their lives.

In addition to her research, Kate has enjoyed working with undergraduate students at Princeton as a teaching assistant and as a fellow at the Writing Center. In Spring 2025, she will be co-teaching a course on women’s history at East Jersey State Prison through Princeton’s Prison Teaching Initiative. 

Before coming to Princeton, Kate graduated from Yale University with a B.A. in Political Science. At Yale, Kate conducted research on Black political organizing in the South during the first half of the twentieth century and served as a researcher for the Yale and Slavery Research Project. She is originally from Raleigh, North Carolina, and is a proud graduate of North Carolina public schools.