Biography
Carol Lasser moved to Oberlin in 1980 to teach at Oberlin College. Before she retired in 2017, she gave courses on women, gender and race in American history; she also chaired the History Department and the Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies Program.
She served as President of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic 2016-17.
In 2018, with Gary Kornblith, she published Elusive Utopia: The Struggle for Racial Equality in Oberlin, a history of Oberlin’s loss of its idealistic vision for racial justice.
In 2021, she became the founding director of the Wilson Bruce Evans Home Historical Society (evanshhs.org), which is working with descendants to restore the pre-Civil War house built by an African American abolitionist, Underground Railroad Operative and Oberlin Wellington Rescuer in the 1850s. It will open to the public in 2027 as a museum and educational center focusing on the history of the Evans family, the African American community in Oberlin, and more broadly the struggle for racial justice in the United States.
Her publications include Antebellum American Women (with Stacey Robertson, 2010); Friends and Sisters: Letters Between Lucy Stone and Antoinette Brown Blackwell, 1846-1893, (with Marlene Merrill, 1987), Educating Men and Women Together: Coeducation in a Changing World (1987), and articles addressing topics ranging from Civil War courtship to utopianism to the scholarship of teaching and learning.
Carol earned her B.A. at the University of Pennsylvania and her Ph.D. at Harvard University. With Gary Kornblith, she raised three sons in Oberlin.
