Participant Info

First Name
Lauren
Last Name
Feldman
Country
State
Affiliation
Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy, University of Missouri
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 the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy at the University of Missouri. 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 was previously a predoctoral fellow in the history of the Civil War era at Penn State’s Richards Center for academic year 2022-2023. From 2021-2024, she served as the project coordinator of JHU Hard Histories, a public history initiative examining the histories of racism and discrimination at Johns Hopkins University. Feldman received her PhD in history from JHU in 2023, and an AB in history from Harvard College in 2013.

Recent Publications
Media Coverage
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