Kimba Stahler is a Humanities Without Walls Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities Institute at Penn State University. A political and social historian of the twentieth-century United States, she explores how ordinary Americans conceptualized democracy. Her work considers how citizens envisioned a government of the people and how they participated in their own governance. She earned her Ph.D. from Case Western Reserve University in 2024.

Stahler’s book manuscript, tentatively titled Welfare of, by, and for the Poor: Participatory Democracy in Cleveland’s Multiracial Welfare Rights Movement, draws on oral histories, organizational records, and congressional testimonies to argue that principles of participatory democracy enabled white and Black women on welfare to effectively cooperate while balancing their divergent sources of and solutions for white and Black poverty. Her research projects have been supported by a Social Justice Fellowship, the John A. Peters Fellowship, and other fellowships. Stahler has presented her research at leading national conferences, including the American Historical Association, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, and the Urban History Association. Firmly committed to public-facing scholarship, she has produced numerous digital history projects.