Amy A. Kass - Career

Career

Kass received her B.A. from the University of Chicago, and her M.A. from Brandeis University. In 1973, Kass earned her Ph.D. from The Johns Hopkins University.

In the mid 1960s, Kass began teaching high school history in Lincoln-Sudbury, Massachusetts. During the summer of 1965, she and her husband, Leon Kass, spent a month in Holmes County, Mississippi to do civil rights work. Working with the Medical Community for Human Rights and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), the Kasses "lived with a farmer couple in the Mount Olive community, in a house with no telephone, hot water, or indoor toilet. They visited many families in the community, participated in their activities, and helped with voter registration and other efforts to encourage the people to organize themselves in defense of their rights." Later that fall, Leon Kass wrote a letter to his family and friends detailing the couple's experiences and appealing to them to donate to the Civil Rights Movement.

Kass’s professorial teaching career began at Georgetown University in 1969, where she taught at the Institute for Adult Education. She then taught at the Johns Hopkins University and St. John's College in the 1970s. Her professional career at the University of Chicago started in 1978 when she was appointed Senior Lecturer in the Humanities Department.

Along with her husband Leon Kass, Kass cofounded in 1977 the "Human Being and Citizen" common core course at Chicago, today the most popular humanities core course at Chicago, devoted to the question of what is an excellent human being and what an excellent citizen. She is also founding director of the "Tocqueville Seminars on Civic Leadership" at the University of Chicago.

Kass served on the National Council of the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as on the Council of Scholars of the American Academy of Liberal Education, and as a consultant on American history and civic education at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. In 2005 and 2006, Kass organized a lecture series at the Hudson Institute called “Dialogues on Civic Philanthropy”.