I teach courses on a many different topics related to US political, cultural, and racial history in the modern United States. check out the teaching page on this site to find my syllabi for courses ranging from the History of Whiteness to Deconstructing Disney. I am committed to the practice of public history and helped build the Public Humanities Concentration at Oberlin.
My museum consulting works including serving as a social science researcher and team member for the People in Nature Project at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History; working for the Wilson Bruce Evans Home Historical Society to create a master plan for a new Black abolitionist history site; directing the Oberlin visit of “Courage and Compassion: Our Shared Story of the Japanese American World War II Experience;” and serving a a scholarly advisor for the New-York Historical Society, the Kent State May 4th Walking Tour and Visitor's Center, the Brooklyn Historical Society, Eyes on the Prize Revisited, and Radio Diaries. I served as a member of the Executive Board of the Organization of American Historians from 2016 to 2019, and am an OAH Distinguished Lecturer (check out my OAH lecturer page here). I currently serve on the Board of Trustees of National History Day.
I'm currently working on a new project, tentatively entitled "Dan Emmett and Me," which explores the history of commemoration of blackface performer and "Dixie" composer Daniel Decatur Emmett in his hometown of Mount Vernon, Ohio and my own experience as part of a multiracial family living in the area. Check out my ongoing work in the digital project, "Whitewashing Blackface and Whistling Dixie: The Commemoration of Dan Emmett."
Renee C. Romano
Historian, Teacher, Museum Consultant
I am a historian and museum consultant who is currently the Robert S. Danforth Professor of History, Professor of Africana Studies and Comparative American Studies at Oberlin College. I also teach in the MA Museum Studies program at CUNY School of Professional Studies. I earned a BA in History and Political Science from Yale in 1990, a PhD in History from Stanford in 1996, and a graduate certificate in Museum Studies from Northwestern University in 2021.
My scholarship explores race, historical memory, and public history in U.S. I've written or co-edited five books: Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Postwar America (2003); The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory (co-edited with Leigh Raiford, 2006); Doing Recent History: On Privacy, Copyright, Video Games, Institutional Review Boards, Activist Scholarship, and History that Talks Back (co-edited with Claire Potter, 2012); Racial Reckoning: Prosecuting America's Civil Rights Murders (2014); and Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical is Restaging America's Past (co-edited with Claire Potter, Rutgers University Press, 2018).