Professor Crystal N. Feimster is the Harvey Goldblatt Head of Pierson College and Associate Professor in Yale’s Black Studies Department and American Studies Program, with secondary appointments in the Department of History and the Program in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
A native of North Carolina, Professor Feimster is a historian of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States, specializing in African American history, U.S. women’s history, and the American South. Her research explores slavery, emancipation, racial and sexual violence, and the long struggle for civil rights. Drawing on history, gender studies, and Black studies, her work uncovers stories that have too often been overlooked and asks difficult questions about justice, memory, and the American past.
She is the author of the award-winning Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Harvard University Press), recipient of the W.E.B. Du Bois Book Prize, and has published widely in leading scholarly journals as well as in The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Slate. She is currently completing two books, Truth Be Told: The Battle for Freedom in Civil War Era Louisiana and Uncivil: Sex and Violence in the Civil War South.
Professor Feimster earned her B.A. in History and Women’s Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and her Ph.D. in History from Princeton University. Before joining Yale, she taught at Boston College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
An award-winning teacher and mentor, Professor Feimster teaches courses on African American history, the Long Civil Rights Movement, Critical Race Theory, women’s history, and the Civil War. She has received the Yale Provost Teaching Prize, the Poorvu Family Award for Interdisciplinary Teaching, the Berkeley College Faculty Mentoring Prize, the Afro-American Cultural Center’s Faculty Excellence Award in Teaching and Mentoring, and Yale’s Graduate Mentoring Award in the Humanities.
At Yale, Professor Feimster is deeply committed to undergraduate education and university life. During the 2026–2027 academic year, she serves as Chair of the Eli Whitney Students Program Advisory Committee and Chair of the Science, Technology, and Research Scholars (STARS) Advisory Board. Nationally, she is President of the Southern Association for Women’s Historians, Associate Editor of Civil War History, serves on the Executive Board of the Society of American Historians, and is a Contributing Editor to Labor.
Professor Feimster lives in Leitner House with Professor Dani Botsman, their two sons, Charles and Theo, and Stanley, a flame-point Siamese cat who has appointed himself Pierson’s unofficial feline ambassador. If you stop by, don’t be surprised if Stanley greets you at the door. Professor Feimster always welcomes students’ ideas for Pierson programs, traditions, and events, and especially enjoys collaborating with the Pierson Student Activities Committee (PSAC) and the Pierson College Council (PCC) to bring new ideas to life. Whether over coffee, tea, or a meal in the Pierson Dining Hall, she is always happy to talk about history, college life, or whatever is on your mind.
Associate Head Professor Daniel Botsman
Professor Daniel Botsman teaches courses on the history of Japan from 1500 to the present. Born in Lae, Papua New Guinea (site of one of the many brutal battles fought between Allied and Japanese forces during the Second World War), he spent his formative years in Brisbane, Australia, where he was introduced to the Japanese language at a young age. After an extended visit to Osaka as a high school student the study of Japanese history and society quickly became a guiding intellectual passion. He went on to complete his B.A. in Asian Studies (Hons.) at the Australian National University in Canberra and was awarded the 1992 Rhodes Scholarship for his home state of Queensland. After two years at Merton College, Oxford, where he received an M.Phil. in Economic and Social History, he completed his graduate studies at Princeton University, earning his Ph.D. in History in 1999.
His first academic appointment was in the Faculty of Law at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, where he taught for a year before returning to the United States to take up a position in the history department at Harvard. In 2006 he moved to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was recipient of the James M. Johnston Award for Excellence in Teaching.
Botsman’s publications include a translation of the memoirs of a prominent post-war foreign minister, Okita Saburo: A Life In Economic Diplomacy (Canberra: Australia-Japan Research Center, 1993), and a study of the history of punishment from the 16th to the 20th centuries, Punishment and Power in the Making of Modern Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), also available in Japanese as Chi nurareta jihi, muchi utsu teikoku (Tokyo: Intershift, 2009).
His current research examines the impact that Western ideas about slavery and emancipation had on Japanese society in the second half of the nineteenth century, focusing particularly on the experiences of Japan’s outcaste communities.