Participant Info
- First Name
- Lauren
- Last Name
- Feldman
- Country
- United States
- State
- DC District of Columbia
- lauren.feldman@jhu.edu
- Affiliation
- Johns Hopkins University
- Website URL
- Keywords
- United States; intersectional histories of marriage and family; intimacy and intimate relationships; antebellum era; early republic; legal history of marriage; race, gender, and sexuality
- Availability
- Media Contact
- Additional Contact Information
- PhD
- PhD
Personal Info
- Photo
- About Me
Lauren Feldman is a historian and postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University. She was previously a predoctoral fellow in the history of the Civil War era at Penn State’s Richards Center for academic year 2022-2023. Her work centers on intersectional histories of intimacy, and investigating the broad intellectual question about how norms surrounding relationships in the U.S. have been created and reproduced over time. She is particularly committed to demonstrating how matters surrounding intimacy shed new light on conventional “big-picture” questions of U.S. history and historiography.
Feldman’s book project focuses on the contingent process by which marriage and state became intertwined in the U.S., from the period of the American Revolution to the Civil War. Through an examination of debates over early American marriage laws, she historicizes marriage’s centrality to the formation of United States governance, as well as the implications thereof surrounding the creation and maintenance of a U.S. privatized social structure. As part of this project, she also works on the history of slave marriage in the United States.
Feldman’s work has been supported by multiple institutions, including the American Historical Association, American Society for Legal History, and New-York Historical Society, and has been published in the journal Law and History Review. She also serves as the project coordinator of JHU Hard Histories, a public history initiative that examines the histories of racism and discrimination at the university. Feldman defended her doctoral dissertation at Johns Hopkins University in 2023, and received her AB in history from Harvard College in 2013.
- Recent Publications
- Media Coverage
- Social Media
- Country Focus
- United States
- Expertise by Geography
- United States
- Expertise by Chronology
- 18th century, 19th century, 20th century
- Expertise by Topic
- American Founding Era, Emancipation, Family, Gender, Law, Race, Sexuality, Slavery, Women
