Shana Bernstein (Ph.D., Stanford University, 2003) specializes in 20th Century U.S. History, particularly comparative race and ethnicity. Before joining Northwestern's faculty, where she teaches in the Legal Studies, American Studies, and Asian American Studies Programs as well as the History Department, she was Associate Professor of History at Southwestern University in Texas. She is a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians and a former Public Voices Fellow with Northwestern's OpEd Project. She has won fellowships from the Mellon Foundation and the Huntington Library, among other institutions. Her first book, Bridges of Reform: Interracial Civil Rights Activism in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles (Oxford University Press, 2011), reinterprets U.S. civil rights activism by revealing its roots in the interracial efforts of Mexican, Jewish, African, and Japanese Americans in mid-century Los Angeles, and showing how the early Cold War facilitated, rather than derailed, some forms of activism. Bernstein is currently working on a project examining the history of strawberries from an environmental, consumer, and worker perspective.
