Amy Kittelstrom (PhD History, Boston University 2004) is a Professor of History at Sonoma State University who specializes in American thought and culture. She is the author of The Religion of Democracy (Penguin, 2015), which traces the development of liberal intellectual culture from its Christian roots in the eighteenth-century concept of moral agency to post-Christian pluralism by the turn of the twentieth century.

She has written critical essays on the state of the field of American intellectual history, including “The Life of the Mind in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic (2023) and “The American Mind is Dead, Long Live the American Mind,” Modern Intellectual History (2021). Her current book project is an intellectual history of James Baldwin (1924-1987) that excavates the reading that shaped him to reconstruct the liberatory intellectual tradition he exemplified; this research produced “James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, and the Ever-Deferred Dream,” Black Perspectives (2023).

Since 2023, she has been the lead investigator of groundbreaking research on the history of slavery in Sonoma County, California, in partnership with the Santa Rosa-Sonoma County NAACP.