Nancy MacLean

Nancy K. MacLean is an American historian and the William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University. She specializes in 20th-century U.S. history, with a focus on race, gender, labor history, and social movements, particularly in the U.S. South. MacLean completed a combined B.A./M.A. program in history at Brown University in 1981, graduating magna cum laude. She later received her Ph.D. in history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1989. MacLean's doctoral thesis was published as her first book, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (1994). She has taught at Northwestern University and chaired the Department of History there from 1989 to 2010.