Kate Wittenstein, Program Director, Civil Rights J-term, is Professor of History at Gustavus Adolphus College.  She is an interdisciplinary scholar with a Ph.D. in American Studies from Boston University.  She regularly teaches courses in both the women’s studies and history departments.  Her courses include United States Women’s History, a survey of African American history, and courses on the Jim Crow South and the Civil Rights Movement, 1941-1965 that focuses on the work of community activists at the local level in the Deep South.  Over the past several years her interest in the history of the Civil Rights Movement has taken her to many of the sites included in the HECUA course.  In 1998 she was selected as one of twenty college and university professors to participate in the National Endowment for the Humanities Institute “Teaching the History of the Southern Civil Rights Movement,” at the W.E.B. DuBois Institute at Harvard University. The Institute was conducted by leading historians Henry Louis Gates, Waldo Martin, and Patricia Sullivan. Professor Wittenstein is especially interested in African American women’s history and more specifically in the role of African American women in the civil rights movement. Her current research revolves around African American feminist and civil rights activist Anna Arnold Hedgeman (1899-1990), the only woman to serve on the organizing committee for the 1963 March on Washington.