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Christine Stansell Prof. Stansell has retired and no longer directs BA theses or accepts new graduate students. Email
Stein-Freiler Distinguished Service Professor Emerita of US History and the College

Yale University, PhD '79

BIOGRAPHY

Christine Stansell writes about the social, sexual, and cultural history of American women and gender relations. Her most recent book, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (Henry Holt, 2000), follows an influential group of writers, artists, and political radicals from 1890 to 1920. Stansell’s first book, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (Knopf, 1986), reveals the central role that working-class women played in the city’s history. She worked in the new field of the history of sexuality, collaborating with Ann Snitow and Sharon Thompson to publish Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality (Monthly Review Press, 1983).

She has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Institute for Advanced Study, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Photo of Matthew Kruer
Matthew Kruer Liaison to the Newberry Consortium in American Indian and Indigenous Studies
Faculty Affiliate, Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture
Democracy Initiative Faculty Working Group Office: Social Science Research Building, 225C Mailbox 59 Phone: (773) 834-6794 Email Interests:

Early American history; Indigenous histories; settler colonialism; sovereignty; conspiracy theory; histories of emotions
Assistant Professor of Early North American History and the College

University of Pennsylvania, PhD '15

OFFICE HOURS

BIOGRAPHY

Matthew Kruer is a scholar of early modern North America exploring the relationship between Indigenous power and the development of the British empire. He holds a master’s degree in history from the University of Oregon and a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania.

Kruer’s first book, Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America, examines the tumultuous decade between 1675 and 1685, during which ethnic riots and separatist movements swept through New York, Maryland colonists launched two uprisings, Virginia colonists rebelled against their government, and North Carolina colonists engaged in full-blown revolution. These colonial insurrections were closely connected with a spasm of wars among Indigenous nations ranging from the Great Lakes and the Deep South. Framing this chaotic violence as a single event, which he calls the Time of Anarchy, he shows that these seemingly distinct conflicts were connected by the Susquehannocks, a once-powerful Indigenous nation in what is currently Pennsylvania. Expelled from their homes by colonial militia and scattered across eastern North America, Susquehannocks exerted a political influence wildly disproportionate to their numbers, in the process reshaping both Native nations and English colonies. This book explores the forms of power exercised by seemingly weak and vulnerable Indigenous migrants, who in their struggles for survival and resurgence drove political struggle and social change in early America.

His next project explores discourses of sovereignty among Indigenous nations within the early modern British empire and the evolution of British settler colonialism in North America and the Caribbean.

Kruer serves as the University of Chicago’s liaison to the Newberry Consortium in American Indian and Indigenous Studies (NCAIS), which links universities across the United States and Canada engaged in Indigenous Studies. Each year NCAIS holds a Graduate Student Conference, runs a 3-day Spring Workshop and 4-week Summer Institute in research methods, and offers fellowships for faculty and graduate students. Please contact Prof. Kruer for additional information about these opportunities and about Indigenous Studies at the University of Chicago.

Recent Research / Recent Publications

Publications

  • Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2021).

  • “Bloody Minds and Peoples Undone: Emotion, Family, and Political Order in the Susquehannock-Virginia War,” William and Mary Quarterly 74, no. 3 (2017): 401-436.

  • “Indian Subjecthood and White Populism in British America,” in Ideology and U.S. Foreign Relations: New Histories, ed. David Milne and Christopher McKnight Nichols (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022)

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Neil Harris Prof. Harris has retired and no longer directs BA theses or accepts new graduate students. Email
Preston & Sterling Morton Professor Emeritus of US History, Art History, and the College

Harvard University, PhD '65

BIOGRAPHY

A cultural historian, Neil Harris has written about American art, artists, and art collecting; the history of technology, architecture, and design; American entertainment; world's fairs; and the development of American museums, libraries, and learned societies. In addition to more than one hundred papers and reviews that have appeared in print since 1962, recent and forthcoming published essays treat American art collectors and patterns of British deaccessioning; period rooms and American art museums; American world’s fairs and the taste for Japonisme; and the growth of interest, in Chicago and elsewhere, in Art Deco.

Harris served as chair of the History Department from 1985–88 and 2000–01. He served as chairman of the American Council of Learned Societies and of the Smithsonian Council, as a senator for Phi Beta Kappa. Harris has sat on the editorial boards of the New England Quarterly, the Winterthur Portfolio, the American Quarterly, the Frederick Law Olmsted Papers, and several other periodicals and projects.

 

Honors

  • 1978–86 Pesidential Appointee, National Museum Services Board

  • 1985 Visiting Directeur d'Etudes, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales

  • 1986 Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Lecturer

  • 1990 Joseph Henry Medal, Smithsonian Institution

  • 1990–91 Getty Scholar

  • 1993 Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences

  • 1995–96 Distinguished Scholar, National Museum of American Art

  • 1999–2000 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship and a Getty Visiting Scholarship

  • 2008 Lawrence A. Fleischman Award, Archives of American Art

  • 2010 Iris Foundation Award and a Mellon Emeritus Fellowship

  • 2022 Harvard University Centennial Medal

Board Service

 

  • Art Institute of Chicago (Architecture and Design Committee)

  • J. Paul Getty Museum

  • National Museum of American History

  • Newberry Library

  • Terra Foundation for American Art

  • Henry du Pont Winterthur Museum

Recent Research / Recent Publications

Publications (Selected)

  • with Teri J. Edelstein. En Guerre: French Illustrators and World War I. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014, which accompanied an exhibition at the University of Chicago Library.

  • Cultural Capital: J. Carter Brown, the National Gallery of Art, and the Reinvention of the Museum Experience. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.

  • The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.

  • Chicago Apartments: A Century of Lakefront Luxury. New York: Acanthus Press, 2004.

  • Building Lives. Constructing Rites and Passages. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.

  • Planes, Trains, and Automobiles: The Transportation Revolution in Children's Picture Books. University of Chicago Library, 1995, which accompanied an exhibition at the library.

  • Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

  • Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum. University of Chicago Press, 1981.

  • The Artist in American Society: The Formative Years, 1790–1860. New York: George Braziller, 1966.

Photo of Adam Green
Adam Green Faculty Board Member, Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture
Senior Fellow, Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts, the College Office: Kelly Hall 107 Mailbox 102 Email Interests:

Modern US history; African American history; urban history; comparative racial politics; cultural economy
Associate Professor in the Departments of Race, Diaspora, & Indigeneity and History, and the College

Yale University, PhD '98

Recent Research / Recent Publications

Publications

Selling the Race: Culture and Community in Black Chicago, 1940–1955. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Coeditor Charles Payne. Time Longer than Rope: Studies in African American Activism, 1850–1950. New York: New York University Press, 2003.

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Kathleen Neils Conzen Prof. Conzen has retired and no longer directs BA theses or accepts new graduate students. Email
Thomas E. Donnelley Professor Emerita of American History and the College

University of Wisconsin-Madison, PhD ' 72

BIOGRAPHY

Kathleen Neils Conzen’s research and teaching has focused on the social and political history of the nineteenth- century United States, with particular concern for themes of immigration, ethnicity, religion, western expansion, and urban development. Much of her research and writing has used the German immigrant experience to explore links between migration processes and community formation; ethnic and other identities; interrelationships among religious, ethnic, and regional cultures; and the political integration of immigrant minorities into the national community. Current projects include explorations of the role of German immigrants in the emergence of California's nineteenth-century wine industry and of German American efforts to develop and defend a theory of pluralistic democratic nationalism.

Recent Research / Recent Publications

Selected Publications

  • “German Jews and the German-speaking Civic Culture of Nineteenth-century America.” In American Jewry: Transcending the European Experience? edited by Christian Wiese and Cornelia Wilhelm, 105–24. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016.

  • Eva Hofmann Gundlach, Letters and Poems, 1849–1874: From Bavaria to Early San Francisco—A Story of Love and Opportunity, compiled by Lee Sims  and translated by Hannah Shield and Kathleen N. Conzen. El Granada, CA: Del Oro Publishing, 2016.

  • “Before the Chicago School: Vernacular Assimilation Theory in Later 19th Century Immigrant Chicago.” In Global Cities—Metropolitan Cultures: A Transatlantic Perspective, edited by Barbara Hahn and Meike Zwingenberger, 101–12. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2011.

  • “Reshaping the Nation: Federal Employment, Civil Service Reform, and the Turners of Washington, D.C.” In Adolf Cluss und die Turnbewegung: Vom Heilbronner Turnfest 1846 ins amerikanische Exil, edited by Lothar Wieser and Peter Wanner, 79–84. Heilbronn: Stadtarchiv Heilbronn, 2007.

  • “Die Residenzler: German Americans in the Making of the Nation's Capital.” In Adolf Cluss, Architect: From Germany to America, edited by Alan Lessoff and Christof Mauch, 55–67. Washington, D.C.: Historical Society of Washington, D.C. and Heilbronn: Stadtarchiv Heilbronn, 2005.

  • "Immigrant Religion and the Public Sphere: The German Catholic Milieu in America." In German-American Immigration and Ethnicity in Comparative Perspective, edited by Wolfgang Helbich and Walter D. Kamphoefner, 69-114. Madison: Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2004.

  • Germans in Minnesota. Saint Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2003.

  • "Ethnicity and Musical Culture among the German Catholics of the Sauk, 1854–1920." In Land without Nightingales: Music in the Making of German-America, edited by Philip V. Bohlman and Otto Holzapfel, 31–71. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002.

  • "German-Catholic Communalism and the American Civil War: Exploring the Dilemmas of Transatlantic Political Integration." In Bridging the Atlantic: Europe and the United States in Modern Times, edited by Elisabeth Glaser-Schmidt and Hermann Wellenreuther, 119–44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

  • "Phantom Landscapes of Colonization: Germans in the Making of a Pluralist America." In The German-American Encounter: Conflict and Cooperation between Two Cultures, 1800–2000, edited by Frank Trommler and Elliott Shore, 7–21. New York: Berghahn Books, 2001.

  • "Pi-ing the Type: Jane Grey Swisshelm and the Contest of Midwestern Regionality." In The American Midwest: Essays on Regional History, edited by Andrew L. Cayton and Susan Gray, 91–110. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.

  • "German Catholics in America." In The Encyclopedia of American Catholic History, edited by Michael Glazier and Thomas J. Shelley, 571–83. Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 1997.

  • "The Winnebago Urban System: Indian Policy and Townsite Promotion on the Upper Mississippi." In Cities and Markets: Studies in the Organization of Human Space, edited by Rondo Cameron, 269–310. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1997.

  • "Forum: The Place of Religion in Urban and Community Studies." Religion and American Culture 6 (1996): 108–14.

  • "The Stories Immigrants Tell." Swedish American Historical Quarterly 46 (1995): 49–57.

  • "A Saga of Families." In Oxford History of the American West, edited by Clyde A. Milner II, Carol A. O'Conner, and Martha A. Sandweiss, 315–57. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.

  • "Ethnic Patterns in American Cities: Historiographical Trends." In Swedes in America: New Perspectives, edited by Ulf Beijbom, 24–32. Växjö, Sweden: Swedish Emigrant Institute, 1993.

  • "Mainstreams and Side Channels: The Localization of Immigrant Cultures." Journal of American Ethnic History 11 (1991): 5–20.

  • "Immigrants in Nineteenth-Century Agricultural History." In Agriculture and National Development: Views on the Nineteenth Century, edited by Louis Ferleger, 303–42. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1990.

  • Co-authored with David A. Gerber, Ewa Morawska, George E. Pozzetta, and Rudolph J. Vecoli. "The Invention of Ethnicity." Journal of American Ethnic History 12 (1992): 3–41.

  • "Ethnicity as Festive Culture: German-America on Parade." In The Invention of Ethnicity, edited by Werner Sollors,  44–76. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Photo of Jonathan Levy
Jonathan Levy Associate Faculty Member, Law School
Faculty Affiliate, Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture
Faculty Chair, Law, Letters, and Society
Senior Fellow, Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts, the College Office: Social Science Research Building, room 504 Mailbox 32 Phone: (773) 702-8369 Email Interests:

United States; economic history; capitalism; global and comparative history; legal history; intellectual history; slavery and emancipation
James Westfall Thompson Professor of US History, Fundamentals, Social Thought, and the College

University of Chicago, PhD '08

BIOGRAPHY

I am a historian of the economy, the United States, and capitalism. In addition to being a member of the Department of History and the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought I am the current Faculty Director of the Law, Letters, and Society program.

My most recent book is Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States (Random House, 2021), which is a history of American economic life from British colonial settlement through the Great Recession. The book is also a single-volume history of the United States.

My next book, The Real Economy: History and Theory (Princeton University Press, forthcoming 2025) argues for a novel theory of the economy, its history, and its politics. It draws inspiration from the economics of Thorstein Veblen and John Maynard Keynes, and seeks to offer a theory of the economy that is open to rich empirical and theoretical study from across the social sciences and humanities.

My future research projects include The Midas Touch, a global history of the demand for money from ancient times through the present, as well a planetary history of the city of Houston. I wrote a series of essays on Houston for the Visualizing Climate and Loss Project at Harvard’s Center for History and Economics.

My book, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Harvard, 2012), won the Organization of American Historians' Frederick Jackson Turner Award, Ellis W. Hawley Prize, and Avery O. Craven Award and the American Society for Legal History's William Nelson Cromwell Book Prize.

Recent Courses Offered

Undergraduate

  • Property and the Public Interest
  • The United States, 2000-2008
  • History of Populism in the United States

Graduate

  • The Global History of Money
  • Topics in US History: The New Deal
  • Emergence of Capitalism

Recent Research / Recent Publications

Publications (Selected)
Related Links
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Jane Dailey Affiliated Faculty, Center for Gender and Sexuality Studies
Faculty Affiliate, Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture
Faculty Board, Pozen Family Center for Human Rights Office: Social Science Research Building, room 225A
Mailbox 93
 Phone: (773) 834-2582 Email Interests:

Modern United States social and political history, African American history, the American South, human rights, and legal history
Professor of American History, the Law School, and the College

Princeton University, PhD '95

BIOGRAPHY

I am a professor in History, the College, and the Law School. My most recent book, White Fright: The Sexual Panic at the Heart of America's Racist History (Basic Book, 2020), concerns race, sex, and the civil rights movement from emancipation to the present. My next most recent book is Building the American Republic, Volume 2: A Narrative History From 1877 (Chicago, 2018). Both volumes are free in e-book form.

My work has revolved around the relationship between race, sex, and politics in the post-Emancipation South. My first book, Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia (North Carolina, 2000), analyzed the conditions that facilitated and, ultimately, undid interracial democracy in the post–Civil War South. An edited collection with Glenda E. Gilmore and Bryant Simon, Jumpin' Jim Crow: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights (Princeton, 2000), continued the theme of African American resistance to white domination from Reconstruction through the 1950s. A third book, The Age of Jim Crow: A Norton Documentary History (Norton, 2008), examines the creation and dissolution of legal segregation in America through primary sources.

My awards include fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Academy in Berlin, the Alphonse Fletcher Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Recent Research / Recent Publications

Publications

  • White Fright: The Sexual Panic at the Heart of America's Racist History. New York: Basic Book, 2020.

  • Building the American Republic, Volume 2: A Narrative History from 1877. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2018.

  • "The Theology of Unionism and Anti-Unionism." Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 14, no. 1 (Mar. 2017): 83–85.

  • Senior editor for legal history, Oxford Research Encyclopedias: American History, edited by Jon Butler. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013–present.

  • "Is Marriage a Civil Right? The Politics of Intimacy in the Jim Crow Era." In The Folly of Jim Crow: Rethinking the Segregated South, edited by Stephanie Cole and Natalie J. Ring, 176–208. College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2012.

  • "The Civil Rights Movement in the South." In Speaking Out With Many Voices: Documenting American Activism in the 1960s and 1970s, edited by Heather Ann Thompson. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentiss Hall, 2008.

  • "Fighting Hitler and Jim Crow: African Americans and World War II." The Berlin Journal (Fall 2005): 27–30.

  • "The Theology of Massive Resistance." In Massive Resistance, dited by Clive Webb, 151–80. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

  • "Sex, Segregation, and the Sacred After Brown." Journal of American History 91, no. 1 (June 2004): 119–44.

  • "The Congress and White Supremacy, 1860s-1920s." In The American Congress: The Building of Democracy, edited by Julian E. Zelizer, 250–67. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 2004.

  • "The Sexual Politics of Race in WWII America." In Mobilizing the Movement, edited by Kevin Kruse and Stephen Tuck. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Post-Emancipation Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. 

  • "The Limits of Liberalism in the New South: The Politics of Race, Sex, and Patronage in Virginia" and "Introduction." In Jumpin' Jim Crow​: Southern Politics from Civil War to Civil Rights, edited by Jane Dailey, Glenda Gilmore, and Bryant Simon, 3-6, 88–114. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.

  • "Deference and Violence in the Postbellum Urban South: Manners and Massacres in Danville, Virginia." Journal of Southern History 63 (August 1997): 53–90.

Reviews

  • Laura Kipnis's Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus, Christian Century (Oct. 9, 2017).

  • Timothy B. Tyson's Blood Done Sign My Name. Chicago Tribune (May 30, 2004).

  • Steven Hahn's A Nation Under Our Feet. Chicago Tribune (February 22, 2004).

Editorials
News
Related Links
CV
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Amy Dru Stanley Associate Faculty Member, Law School
Faculty Board - Law, Letters, and Society Office: Social Science Research Building, room 209 Mailbox 76 Phone: (773) 702-4327 Email Interests:

American legal history, political economy, slavery and emancipation, gender, intellectual history.
Associate Professor of History, Law, and the College

Yale University, PhD '90

BIOGRAPHY

Amy Dru Stanley is a historian of the United States, with particular interest in law, capitalism, freedom and unfreedom, human rights, the relationship between the household and economic life, and the historical experience of moral problems. Her work has appeared in scholarly books and journals, as well as in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Nation, Dissent, Slate, and Jacobin. She has received the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching and the Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching and Mentoring. In 2018, she was the jury chair for the Pulitzer Prize in history.

Recent Research / Recent Publications

Books

The Antislavery Ethic and the Spirit of Commerce: An American History of Human Rights. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, forthcoming.

From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

  • Frederick Jackson Turner Prize, 1999. (For the best first book in US History, awarded by the Organization of American Historians.)

  • Morris D. Forkosch Award, 1999. (For the best book in intellectual history.)

  • Avery O. Craven Award, 1999. (For the best book on the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction, awarded by the Organization of American Historians.)

  • Frederick Douglass Prize, 1999, honorable mention. (For the best book on the history of slavery.)

Selected Articles & Chapters

  • "The Sovereign Market and Sex Difference: Human Rights in America." In American Capitalism: New Histories, edited by Sven Beckert and Christine Desan. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018.

  • "Slave Emancipation and the Revolutionizing of Human Rights." In The World the Civil War Made, edited by Greg Downs and Kate Masur. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.

  • “Contract.” In Keywords for American Cultural Studies, 2nd ed., edited by B. Burgett and G. Hendler. New York: New York University Press, 2014.

  • "Slave Breeding and Free Love: An Antebellum Argument over Slavery, Capitalism, and Personhood." In Capitalism Takes Command, edited by Michael Zakim and Gary Kornblith. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.

  • "Instead of Waiting for the Thirteenth Amendment: The War Power, Slave Marriage, and Inviolate Human Rights." American Historical Review 115, no. 3 (June 2010): 732–65.

  • "When We Were Young." In Wayne F. Miller: Photographs 1942–1958, edited by Stephen Daiter. Brooklyn: Powerhouse Books, 2008.

  • "Wages, Sin, and Slavery: Some Thoughts on Free Will and Commodity Relations." Journal of the Early Republic 24 (Sum. 2004).

  • "Dominion and Dependence in the Law of Freedom and Slavery." Law & Social Inquiry 28, no. 3 (Aut. 2003): 1127-34.

  • "Marriage, Property, and Ideals of Class." In Blackwell's Companion to American Women's History, edited by Nancy Hewitt. Oxford: Blackwell Press, 2002.

  • "The Right to Possess All the Faculties that God Has Given: Possessive Individualism, Slave Women, and Abolitionist Thought." In Moral Problems in American Life, edited by Lewis Perry and Karen Halttunnen. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999.

  • "Home Life and the Morality of the Marketplace: Slavery and Freedom, Women and Men." In The Market Revolution in America, edited by Melvyn Stokes. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996.

  • "Beggars Can't Be Choosers: Compulsion and Contract in Postbellum America." Journal of American History 78, no. 4 (Mar. 1992): 1265–93.

  • "Conjugal Bonds and Wage Labor: Rights of Contract in the Age of Emancipation." Journal of American History 75, no. 2 (Sept. 1988): 471–500.

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Matthew Briones Faculty Affiliate, Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture
Faculty Affiliate, Center for East Asian Studies
Faculty Director, Social Sciences Teaching Fellows Program
Co-editor for the University of Chicago Press book series, "Chicago Visions and Revisions" Office: Social Science Research Building, room 204B
Mailbox 63
 Phone: (773) 702-1590 Email Interests:

Comparative race relations; Asian/Pacific Islander American history; African American history; Interracial and interethnic coalitions and conflicts; immigration; transnationalism, especially between the United States and the Philippines; and the history of baseball and American culture
Associate Professor of American History and the College

Harvard University, PhD '05

BIOGRAPHY

A deep and abiding interest in the interactions between Asian Americans and African Americans drives my first book manuscript. Focusing primarily on the home front culture of World War II, but utilizing the necessary bookends of the Popular Front of the 1930s and the Cold War of the 1950s, my monograph interrogates the ways in which different racialized and ethnic groups interacted during a heightened sense of possibility for an American multiracial democracy. Unpublished diaries of incarcerated Japanese American, Charles Kikuchi, serve as a narrative through-line for the manuscript—he wrote every day of his life, from the bombing of Pearl Harbor until his death in 1988. While Kikuchi can be considered one of a handful of radical Nisei (second-generation) intellectuals consumed by the constitutional violation of Japanese Americans, he was most deeply concerned with the welfare of African Americans and other oppressed minorities. Recognition of their equality by the rest of the nation would prove key to the fulfillment of democracy at home and abroad. My book therefore considers prototypes for Kikuchi, like Karl Yoneda, a highly visible Communist Party member during the Popular Front, intellectual mentors during the war, such as immigrant activist Louis Adamic, W.I. Thomas, and Dorothy Thomas, social scientists associated with, respectively, the Chicago school of sociology and Japanese evacuation and resettlement study, and “everyday people,” from African Americans on the South Side of Chicago to Filipino migratory farm laborers in central California. The Cold War closes off some of the interracial and democratic possibilities of this fertile intellectual era, but not before a constellation of radical counterpublics appear on the national and international maps. A cartography of this period, therefore, demonstrates not only the importance of reexamination of the Kikuchi diaries, but also the efforts and limits of these particular publics to repossess, reclaim, and redefine American democracy.  

I have been honored to be a dissertation fellow at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, and an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow. Prior to Chicago, I taught at Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, and most recently, the University of Michigan.

Recent Research / Recent Publications

Publications

  • “Filipino Grief in Five Acts.” Amerasia Journal, (2024), 1–7. 

  • "Race (& Love) Matter More Than Ever Now: Affirmative Action, Alliances, and Anti-Asian Hate.”  In Prophetic Leadership and Visionary Hope: New Essays on the Work of Cornel West.  Edited by Barbara Will.  Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023: 161-177.

  • Jim and Jap Crow: A Cultural History of 1940's Interracial America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012.

  • "Charles Kikuchi's 'American Dilemma': African Americans in the Unpublished Diaries of a Nisei Intellectual." In Journey into Otherness: Essays in North American History, Culture and Literature, 191–203. Edited by Ada Savin. Amsterdam: VU Press, 2005.

  • "Hardly 'Small Talk': Discussing Race in the Writing of Hisaye Yamamoto." Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies 29 (2005): 435–72. 

  • "The Unpublished Diaries of Charles Kikuchi: 'Black and Yellow' through the Eyes of a Progressive Nisei Intellectual." Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies 28 (2004): 383–47.  

  • "Call-and-Response: Tracing the Ideological Shifts of Richard Wright through His Correspondence with Friends and Fellow Literati." African American Review 37, no. 1 (spring 2003): 53–64.

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Man in blue shirt with glasses in front of a stone building
Mark Philip Bradley Faculty Director, Pozen Family Center for Human Rights
Senior Fellow, Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts, the College
Editor, American Historical Review Office: Social Science Research Building, room 502
Mailbox 19
 Phone: (773) 702-3558 Email Interests:

Twentieth-century US international history; global history of human-rights politics; postcolonial Southeast Asia
Bernadotte E. Schmitt Distinguished Service Professor of International History and the College

Harvard University, PhD '95

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Twentieth-century US international history; global history of human-rights politics; postcolonial Southeast Asia

BIOGRAPHY

Mark Philip Bradley is the author of The World Reimagined: Americans and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (2016), Vietnam at War (2009), and Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam (2000), which won the Harry J. Benda Prize from the Association for Asian Studies. He is the coeditor of Making the Forever War (2021), Familiar Made Strange: American Icons and Artifacts after the Transnational Turn (2015), Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars (2008), and Truth Claims: Representation and Human Rights (2001). Bradley's work has appeared in the American Historical Review, Journal of American History, the Journal of World History, Diplomatic History, and Dissent. His current project is an intellectual and cultural history of the global South under contract with Yale University Press.

A recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Fulbright-Hays, Bradley was appointed editor of the American Historical Review in 2021.  He has served as the elected president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, general editor for the four volume Cambridge History of America and the World and coeditor of the Cornell University Press book series, The United States in the World.

Recent Research / Recent Publications

Books
Edited Volumes

  • The Familiar Made Strange: American Icons and Artifacts after the Transnational Turn, coeditor with Brooke L. Blower. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015.

  • Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars: Transnational and International Perspectives, coeditor with Marilyn B. Young. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

  • Truth Claims: Representations and Human Rights, coeditor with Patrice Petro. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002.

Selected Essays and Articles

  • “Making Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s The Spector of the Ancestors Becoming,” American Historical Review 127.3 (September 2022): 1312-18. 

  • “What is America and the World?”, Cambridge History of America and the World, volume 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021): 1-7. 

  • “The Anecdote,” co-written with Lee Weng-Choy, Portable Gray 4.2 (Fall 2021): 310-18.

  • "Understanding the Rise of the Global South in Pandemic Times." Diplomatic History 45, no. 3 (2021): 460-67.

  • "Making Peace as a Project of Moral Reconstruction." In The Cambridge History of the Second World War, vol. 3, edited by Michael Geyer and Adam Tooze, 528–551. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

  • Cowritten with Viet Thanh Nguyen. "Vietnam: American and Vietnamese Public Diplomacy, 1945–2010." In Adversarial States, US Foreign Policy, and Public Diplomacy, edited by Geoffrey Wiseman, 110–139. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015.

  • “American Vernaculars: The United States and the Global Human Rights Imagination (Presidential Address),” Diplomatic History 38, no. 1 (Jan. 2014): 1–21.

  • “The Charlie Maier Scare: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations, 1959–1980.” In America in the World: The Historiography of American Foreign Relations since 1941, 2nd ed., edited by Frank Costigliola and Michael J. Hogan, 9–29. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

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  • “The United States and the Global Human Rights Politics in the 1940s.” In Civil Religion, Human Rights and International Relations, edited by Helle Porsdam, 118–35. London: Edward Elgar, 2012.

  • “Writing Human Rights History.” Il Mestiere di storico 3, no. 2 (2011): 13–30.

  • “Approaching the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” In The Human Rights Revolution: An International History, edited by Akira Iriye, Petra Goode, and William Hitchcock, 327–43. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

  • “Setting the Stage: Vietnamese Revolutionary Nationalism and the First Vietnam War.” In The Columbia History of the Vietnam Wars, edited by David Anderson, 93–119. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.

  • "Decolonization, Revolutionary Nationalism, and the Cold War, 1919-1962." In The Cambridge History of the War, vol. 1, edited by Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

  • "The Ambiguities of Sovereignty: The United States and the Global Rights Cases of the 1940s." In Art of the State: Sovereignty Past and Present, edited by Douglas Howland and Luise White. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008.

  • "Introduction." In Human Rights and Revolution, edited by Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Lynn Hunt, and Greg Grandin. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007.

  • "Interchange: Legacies of the Vietnam Wars." Journal of American History 43, no. 2 (Sept. 2006): 452–91.

  • "Making Sense of the French War: Postcolonial Modernity and Vietnam, 1946-1954." In Indochina in the Balance: New Perspectives on the First Vietnam War, edited by Mark Lawrence and Fredrik Logevall, 16–40. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.

  • "The Imperial and the Postcolonial." In Palgrave Advances in International History, edited by P. Finney, 247–266. London and New York: Palgrave/Macmillan Press, 2005.

  • "Becoming Van Minh: Civilizational Discourse and Rights Talk in Colonial Vietnam." Journal of World History 15, no. 1 (Mar. 2004): 65–83.

  • "Franklin Roosevelt, Trusteeship and US Exceptionalism: Reconsidering American Visions of Postcolonial Vietnam." In The Transformation of Southeast Asia: International Perspectives on Decolonization, edited by Marc Frey, Ronald W. Preussen, and Tan Tai Yong, 197–212. Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 2003; and in A Companion to the Vietnam War, edited by Marilyn B.Young and Robert Buzzanco, 130–145. New York: Blackwell Publishing, 2002.

  • "Contests of Memory: Remembering and Forgetting War in the Contemporary Vietnamese Cinema." In The Country of Memory: Remaking the Past in Late Socialist Vietnam, edited by Hue-Tam Ho Tai, 196–226. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

  • "Slouching Toward Bethlehem: Culture, Diplomacy, and the Origins of the Cold War in Vietnam." In Cold War Constructions: The Political Culture of United States Imperialism, 1945–1966, edited by Christian G. Appy, 11–34. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000.

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