Leandra Ruth Zarnow is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and affiliate faculty in the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program at University of Houston. A specialist in U.S. women’s political, legal, and intellectual history, she has additional interests in media and archival studies and global gender history. Before coming to University of Houston, she taught at Stanford University as an American Council of Learned Societies New Faculty Fellow in the History Department.

Leandra is the author of Batting Bella: The Protest Politics of Bella Abzug (Harvard University Press, 2019), a political biography of New York’s firebrand trailblazer Representative Bella Abzug. Along with historian Stacie Taranto, she has also co-edited the collection, Suffrage at 100: Women in American Politics Since 1920 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020).

Leandra frequently comments on women in politics and women’s issues. A public historian, she seeks to bridge academic, activist, and community spaces in her work on and off university campuses.

Leandra earned a BA in American Studies and Government from Smith College and MA and PhD in US History with a Doctoral Emphasis in Feminist Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara.