Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, the eminent feminist scholar and professor emerita of History, American Culture, and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, is the author of several books and many groundbreaking essays on gender, sexuality, feminism, body politics, race and colonialism.

She radically changed the conceptualization of nineteenth-century gender relations with her pioneering 1975 article “The Female World of Love and Ritual." She argued that women act as agents of their own history and are not merely acted upon. With the use of diaries and letters of women during a period ranging from the 1760s to the 1880s, Smith-Rosenberg contended that American women in this period constituded a mutually supportive society separate from the world of their fathers, brothers, and husbands, in which women were of primary importance in each other's lives. Her study broke away from a Freudian perspective and provided evidence of passionately romantic relations among women that lasted lifetimes and were unaffected by their marriages.

She has held many fellowships, including from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Professor Smith-Rosenberg is a past Director of American Culture and a former member of the LSA Executive Committee. She has twice received the Binkley-Stephenson Award for best article in the Journal of American History. Her most recent book is This Violent Empire: The Birth of an American National Identity (2010).