Dr. Sara Rzeszutek teaches courses in African American, United States, women’s, and public history. She is interested in using the community as a classroom and integrating the vast local historical resources into student learning experiences. As a faculty participant in Brooklyn Historical Society’s Students and Faculty in the Archives (SAFA) project, she produced a lesson plan for first-year history students to study civil rights in Brooklyn using archival material for the website www.teacharchives.org. She has also served as a faculty member in the American Historical Association’s Tuning Project, which seeks to promote the history major by defining what students should understand and be able to do upon completing a degree program.

Dr. Rzeszutek earned her Ph.D. in history from Rutgers University in 2009 and held a postdoctoral fellowship in historical editing at the Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony editing project. Her research interests focus on the links between political and diplomatic developments and social movements, the black freedom movement, and various strains of American radicalism. She is the author of a book titled James and Esther Cooper Jackson: A Story of Love and the Left in the Black Freedom Movement, which focuses on the connections between marriage and activism in the lives of a black communist couple (forthcoming, 2015). Her next research project will explore how black nationalism and internationalism generated efforts to preserve and commemorate African American history in the late 20th century.