Professor Sklaroff teaches the U.S. survey, Modern Cultural History in America, and an introductory graduate course on the historical literature of the 20th Century. She has published articles in The Journal of American History and American Quarterly; her first book, The Politics of Cultural Exchange: Civil Rights in the Roosevelt Era, is under contract with the University of North Carolina Press. In this project, Professor Sklaroff describes the employment of state-sponsored cultural programs as a form of racial policy during the 1930s and 1940s. Here, she focuses on how radio, film, theatre, and other cultural arenas became central to the state’s institutional development, as officials recognized the growing need to publicly acknowledge African Americans.

Current Activities

Building on my interests in the relationship between culture and the construction of racial identity, I am beginning research on how race has become geographically demarcated in America. In particular, I am focusing on how people living outside of particular regions (the South, the West, certain urban areas) attach racial meaning to those places, and how the modern mass media facilitates this process. I am especially interested in the ways in which television allows people to internalize ideas about communities they have never seen in person, and how various forms of cultural imagery shift their regional affiliation over the course of the century.