Renee C. Romano is the Robert S. Danforth Professor of History and Professor of Comparative American Studies and Africana Studies at Oberlin College and Adjunct Professor of Museum Studies at CUNY School of Professional Studies. A specialist in 20 th  and 21 st  century history of American racial politics and in the field of historical memory, she is the author of Racial Reckoning: Prosecuting America’s Civil Rights Murders (Harvard University Press, 2014) and Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Postwar America (Harvard University Press, 2003.) She is also the co-editor of three collections: Historians on Hamilton (Rutgers Press, 2018) and Doing Recent History (University of Georgia Press, 2012), both co-edited with Claire Potter; and The Civil Rights Movement in American History (University of Georgia Press, 2006), co-edited with Leigh Raiford.

She has served as a consultant or advisor for the New-York Historical Society, the Wilson Bruce Evans Home Historical Society, the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, the May 4th Visitor’s Center at Kent State University, and the Brooklyn Historical Society, among others. Romano’s current research explores the creation and contestation of different narratives of America’s racial history. Inspired by wanting to understand the commemoration of blackface minstrel performer Daniel Decatur Emmett in the town where she used to live, she is at work on a project that brings together history, memoir, and critical race theory to interrogate the ways in which different stories about race and history have been written onto the landscape, edited, erased, or promoted in specific historical moments and environments.