Kristin Ann Hass

Kristin Ann Hass is a Professor in the Department of American Culture and Faculty Coordinator of the Humanities Collaboratory at the University of Michigan. She lectures, teaches, and writes about nationalism, memory, publics, memorialization, militarization, race, visual culture, and material culture studies. She is also a long time advocate for public, enagaged and non-traditional work in the humanities. 

She has written three books. Blunt Instruments: Recognizing Racist Infrastructure in Memorials, Museums and Patriotic Practices helps readers to identify, classify and name elements of our everyday landscapes and cultural practices that are designed to seem benign or natural but which, in fact, work to maintain powerful structures of inequity. Sacrificing Soldiers on the National Mall is a study of militarism, race, war memorials and U.S. nationalism and Carried to the Wall: American Memory and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is an exploration of public memorial practices, material culture studies and the legacies of the Vietnam War.

Hass is also the editor of Being Human During COVID. Over the course of the pandemic, the questions that occupy the humanities—about grieving and publics, the social contract and individual rights, racial formation and xenophobia, ideas of home and conceptions of gender, narrative and representations and power—have become shared life-or-death questions about how human societies work and how culture determines our collective fate. The contributors in this collection draw on scholarly expertise and lived experience to try to make sense of the unfamiliar present. 

Hass is also the faculty coordinator for the University of Michigan Humanities Collaboratory. The Humanities Collaboratory is a bold investment by the university in collaborative, multi-generational, inclusive, and transformational humanities scholarship that engages compelling questions for the academy and the world beyond. The Humanities Collaboratory gives singularly generous grants to support innovative and ambitious forms of humanities scholarship. Our mission is to give humanists access to significant resources to enable new kinds of work on the remarkable diversity of human experience across the globe.

She holds a Ph.D. in American studies and has worked in several historical museums, including the National Museum of American History. She was also the co-founder and Associate Director of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life, a national consortium of educators and activists dedicated to campus-community collaborations.

Affiliations:

Faculty Coordinator of the Humanities Collaboratory