Rate My Professor Karen Benjamin

Karen Benjamin is the Lester Brune and Joan Brune Endowed Chair of History, Associate Professor of History, and Director of First-Year Seminars in the Department of History at Elmhurst University. She earned her Ph.D. in History from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2007. Benjamin joined Elmhurst University in the 2018-2019 academic year, following her tenure as an associate professor of history at Saint Xavier University, where she received a Spencer Foundation grant for her research in 2017. Her research specializations encompass Colonial America, Revolutionary America, Industrial-Age America, Twentieth-Century U.S. history, Environmental History, U.S. West, U.S. South, U.S. Women’s History, and The Formation of the Chicago Ghetto. A central focus of her scholarship is the history of residential segregation, exploring how white residential developers, planning consultants, and government allies in New South cities such as Atlanta, Baltimore, Birmingham, Houston, Raleigh, and Winston-Salem promoted segregation by tying it to middle-class ideals of parenting and superior schools before the New Deal era.

Benjamin's key publication is the book Good Parents, Better Homes, and Great Schools: Selling Segregation before the New Deal, published by the University of North Carolina Press in July 2025. She also authored an article on a 1920s school building program in Raleigh, North Carolina, featured in a special issue of the Journal of Urban History (Spring 2012). In the classroom, she teaches courses covering her broad research interests. Benjamin has been honored with the President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching at Elmhurst University in 2021, a national credential for teaching excellence in 2019, Spencer Foundation Small Research Grants in 2013 and 2017, and the National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2010. These accomplishments underscore her significant impact in historical scholarship and teaching excellence.