Robert Korstad is Professor of Public Policy and History at Duke University. He received his B.A. and PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

His research interests include twentieth century U. S. history, labor history, African American history, and contemporary social policy, and he is the Associate Director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity. 

His publications include: To Right These Wrongs: The North Carolina Fund and the Battle to End Poverty and Inequality in 1960s America; (coauthor, University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South (University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Talk About Life in the Segregated South (coeditor, The New Press, 2001); Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (coauthor, University of North Carolina Press, revised edition, 2000).