Tracy E. K'Meyer

Professor

About

Tracy E. K’Meyer received her BA from the University of Virginia in 1985, her MA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1988, and her Phd from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1993. After serving as the public history director at New Mexico State University for two years, K’Meyer came to the University of Louisville in 1995, where she has served as Co-Director of the Oral History Center, Chair of the Department of History, and acting Director of the Public History Program.  Her research interests center on modern U.S. social movements, especially against racism, and the role of progressive faith-based activism.  She has written on Koinonia Farm, an interracial cooperative community in southwest Georgia, and on the civil rights and school desegregation struggles in Louisville and Kentucky. Her most recent book is “To Live Peaceably Together”: The American Friends Service Committee’s Housing Activism, 1930-1970 (University of Chicago Press, March 2022), in which she examines the strategies used by Quakers and their allies to create decent, integrated residential communities where people of different race and class could live together in dignity, as a way toward a more just, democratic, and peaceful world. K’Meyer’s ongoing work includes Under the Greenwood Tree: 60 Years of Kentucky Shakespeare and We Had a Hammer: The Origins of the Self-Help Housing Movement in the United States.

 

In the classroom, K’Meyer focuses on the Modern United States. She teaches the introductory US Survey as part of the Cardinal Core program, as well as upper division courses on the Civil Rights Movement (HIST 322) and Modern United States Social Movements (HIST 323); the Historical Methods course (HIST 304), and seminars and graduate courses in The United States 1929-45, and 1945-Present. K’Meyer also teaches the oral history methodology seminar and runs the internship program for the department.