Kathleen Belew

Kathleen Belew is an author, historian and teacher. Belew spent ten years researching and writing her first book, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (2018). In it, she explores how white power activists created a social movement through a common story about betrayal by the government, war, and its weapons, uniforms, and technologies. Belew has appeared on The Rachel Maddow Show, AC 360 with Anderson Cooper, Frontline, Fresh Air, and All Things Considered, among others. Her research featured prominently in documentaries such as Homegrown Hate: The War Among Us (ABC) and Documenting Hate: New American Nazis (Frontline). As Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University, Belew’s award-winning teaching centers on the broad themes of history of the present, conservatism, race, gender, violence, and the meaning of war. Her next book, Home, at the End of the World, illuminates our era of apocalypse through a history focused on her native Colorado where, in the 1990s, high-profile kidnappings and murders, right-wing religious ideology, and a mass shooting exposed tears in America’s social fabric, and dramatically changed our relationship with place, violence, and politics (Random House). Belew (Ph.D. in American Studies, Yale University) has held postdoctoral fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, Northwestern University, and Rutgers University. She is co-editor of A Field Guide to White Supremacy (2021) and has contributed essays to The Presidency of Donald J. Trump: A First Historical Assessment (2022) and the New York Times bestseller Myth America: Historians Take on the Biggest Lies and Legends about Our Past (2023).