Kathy Peiss is the author of Information Hunters: When Librarians, Soldiers, and Spies Banded Together in World War II Europe. The story of the American archivists and librarians who, during World War II, helped rescue, preserve, and repatriate huge numbers of books, newspapers, and manuscripts looted by the Nazis or otherwise hidden from sight, it was published by Oxford University Press.
She is the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History at Penn, where she teaches courses on modern American cultural history and the history of American sexuality, women, and gender. Her previous books include Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award and named one of Amazon’s ten best books in Women’s Studies.
Zoot Suit: The Enigmatic Career of an Extreme Style, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. It received the Costume Society of America’s Millia Davenport Publication Award for the best book in costume history. Her first book, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York was published by Temple University Press.