Kathy Peiss Awarded American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship

Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of History Kathy Peiss has been awarded an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) fellowship for her book project The Collecting Missions of World War II. ACLS has provided fellowships for scholars in the humanities and related social sciences for nearly 90 years.

Peiss’s research includes the history of working women; working-class and interracial sexuality; leisure, style, and popular culture; the beauty industry in the U.S. and abroad; and print culture and cultural policy during World War II. She is particularly interested in the ways that commerce and culture have shaped the everyday life and popular beliefs of Americans across time.

Peiss’s books include Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and Zoot Suit: The Enigmatic Career of an Extreme Style, which received the 2012 Millia Davenport Publication Award of the Costume Society of America. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, Smithsonian Institution, Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.  She has been elected a fellow of the Society of American Historians and is a member of the Society’s Executive Board.  

Her current project concerns American librarians, book collectors, and information specialists in the World War II era.  She is exploring the uses and meaning of print culture in a time of war and devastation, and addresses the history of open-source intelligence gathering, mass acquisition projects, the restitution of book collections, and the problems of cultural reconstruction. You can read more about it here.