Matthew Guterl  
External Faculty Fellow, Associate Professor of African American & African Diaspora Studies and American Studies, Indiana University
Mother of the World: Josephine Baker and the Rainbow Tribe

Guterl has made invaluable contributions to the conversations surrounding the conceptualizations of race within the 19th- and early 20th-century Americas. He has helped add to the historiography of slavery and other racialized labor systems an important transnational dimension. His current project re-examines a commonly overlooked episode in the life of superstar Josephine Baker, her effort—subsequent to her career as an entertainer—to adopt and raise twelve children from across the global South, opening up her private life to a new level of public scrutiny.He has authored two books, American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation  (Harvard UP, 2008) and the award-winning The Color of Race in America, 1900-1940  (Harvard UP, 2001).  Dr. Guterl will teach a course on “Rainbow Families: Multiracial and Transnational Adoption since 1945” through the Department of History.