Profile

Jennifer Ritterhouse received her B.A. in History and Literature from Harvard University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in U.S. History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a historian of the American South and of African-American, women’s, and children’s history. She has recently completed a book titled Growing Up Jim Crow: How Black and White Southern Children Learned Race (UNC Press, May 2006), which examines how black and white southern children growing up in the segregated South came to understand both the racial roles they were expected to play in their society and a sense of their own identities as "black" or "white."

Dr. Ritterhouse is also the author of several articles, including "Reading, Intimacy, and the Role of Uncle Remus in White Southern Social Memory," which appeared in the Journal of Southern History in 2003. She wrote an introduction and selected letters for a 2001 reprint edition of white civil rights advocate Sarah Patton Boyle's autobiography, The Desegregated Heart: A Virginian's Stand in Time of Transition. She was also a co-editor of the award-winning Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South.

Dr. Ritterhouse offers a variety of courses in African-American, southern and U.S. women's history, in addition to a survey course on the United States since 1865.