Peter Rutkoff

Who is Peter Rutkoff?

Peter Rutkoff is Professor of American Studies at Kenyon College and director of the Kenyon Academic Partnership.

He grew up in New York City and attended Ethical Culture Fieldston School. He received his bachelor's degree at St. Lawrence University in 1964, and went on to attend the University of Pennsylvania for his M.A. and Ph.D. He is a widely respected teacher and scholar, and a professor at Kenyon College.

With William Scott, a Kenyon colleague, he ran a humanities seminar on the migration of African Americans from the South to the North. They developed a classroom project which examines this Great Migration. Students and faculty traveled to cities to study the impact of the migration. His course has attracted much grant support and is entitled “North by South: The Great African-American Migration, 1900-1960.” It includes two-week long field trips where students research archives, documents, and oral-history interviews in two different cities, one from the north and one from the south. The pairing of two cities, such as Memphis, Tennessee, and Chicago, Illinois, and Birmingham, Alabama, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, studies true migration patters of southern African Americans to the north. He and Scott discovered their own connections while researching for books on the arts scene in New York City. They wanted to allow the students to find their own connections.