Mila Kaut
University of Iowa BA in History, Music, and Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies
Mila Kaut is a doctoral student in U.S. History and a Mellon Cluster Fellow in Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her research focuses on the intersections of race, gender, colonialism, and public memory in the Midwest in the post-Civil War era. She is particularly interested in the relationships between historical commemoration and state-building. Mila’s dissertation project will examine public commemorations of the 1876 centennial anniversary of national founding across the Midwest region. Her project will ask how, in writing, curating, and performing the past in the 1870s-1880s, white Midwesterners came to interpret white settlement and state building as projects of national inheritance. Mila is enthusiastic about stewarding the intersections between the Midwest’s historical, cultural, and environmental landscapes. Mila is a co-organizer of the Iowa Colored Conventions digital project and frequent collaborator on public humanities projects in the Chicago area. Most recently, Mila contributed to the Calumet Region’s efforts to secure designation as a National Heritage Area through stakeholder outreach work. Also in Summer 2023, she designed public programming and developed grant application materials to support the Newberry Library’s environmental humanities initiatives.
