Devlin, Rachel

Rachel Devlin is a professor of history at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. Her scholarship centers on the cultural and social politics of girlhood, sexuality, and race in the United States after World War II. Her most recent book, A Girl Stands at the Door: The Generation of Young Women who Desegregated America's Schools (Basic Books, 2018), considers the disproportionate number of girls and young women who filed lawsuits prior to Brown v. Board of Education, and who were desegregation "firsts" at historically white schools in the early 1960s. Devlin teaches courses on the postwar period in the United States, the history of childhood, the history of sexuality, and women and gender in American history.