Melissa R. Klapper

Melissa R. Klapper (CBA ’17), PhD, is Professor of History and Director of Women’s & Gender Studies at Rowan University in Glassboro, NJ, where she teaches American, Jewish, and women’s history. She is the author of Jewish Girls Coming of Age in America, 1860-1920 (NYU Press, 2005); Small Strangers: The Experiences of Immigrant Children in the United States, 1880-1925 (Ivan R. Dee, Publisher, 2007); and Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace: American Jewish Women’s Activism, 1890-1940 (NYU Press, 2013), which won the 2013 National Jewish Book Award in Women’s Studies. Klapper is active in numerous scholarly societies and lectures frequently in academic and community venues. Her scholarship has won numerous awards, grants, and fellowships from the American Jewish Archives Center, the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Schlesinger Library on the History of American Women at Harvard University, and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, among others. Her most recent book is Ballet Class: An American History (Oxford, 2020), which she worked on while in residence at CBA.