Kathleen Donohue

Kathleen G. Donohue received her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. Before coming to Central Michigan University in 2004, she taught at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, the University of Georgia, Barnard College, and Columbia University.

Research Interests

Kathleen Donohue is an associate professor of history at Central Michigan University. She is primarily interested in the ways in which Americans make sense of their political world. Her first book, Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Idea of the Consumer (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), looked at the role that American ideas about the producer and the consumer played in transforming free-market liberalism into its more activist modern counterpart. Her current book project, Information Wars: The Public's Right to Know and the Making of Modern America," for which she received both a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and a Theodore Sorensen Research Fellowship, examines the ways in which the politics and political discourse surrounding the public's right to know shaped public policy and ideas about democracy, citizenship and governance between 1945 and 1990. She has just completed work on an edited collection entitled "Liberty and Justice for All?: Rethinking Politics in Cold War America," (Amherst, 2012). Her article “Choosing Conservatism in the 1930s: The Political Odyssey of F. J. Schlink” recently appeared The Journal of the Historical Society.

Recent Publications

"Choosing Conservatism in the 1930s: The Political Odyssey of F. J. Schlink," The Journal of the Historical Society 10 (2010).

Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Idea of the Consumer (Johns Hopkins Press, 2003).

"What Gender is the Consumer? The Role of Gender Connotations in Defining the Political," Journal of American Studies (1999).

"From Cooperative Commonwealth to Capitalist Democracy: The Cooperative Ideal in America, 1880-1940," in Labor, Class and Consumption: Consumer Cooperation in Europe and the United States, 1840-1950, ed. Ellen Furlough and Carl Stikwerda (Rowman & Littlefield, 1999).