Rethinking America in a Global Perspective
Biographies of Directors and Speakers
Directors
John R. Gillis is Professor of History at Rutgers University, where, after appointments at Stanford and Princeton, he has taught since 1971. He has spent time in Germany, Britain, Denmark, and Sweden. John’s early focus was on German political history, but he is best known for his studies in British social history on the subjects of age relations, marriage, and family. Youth and History was published in 1975, followed by For Better, For Worse: British Marriage, 1600 to the Present in 1985. His A World of Their Own Making: Myth, Ritual, and the Quest for Family Values (1996) was a study of Anglo-American family cultures. He has always been interested in transnational developments and has edited volumes on reproductive change, militarization, and commemoration. In recent years John’s teaching and research has shifted offshore; and has become increasingly interested in the intersection of history with cultural geography. He has taught the history of the Atlantic world since 1400 and recently authored Islands of the Mind: How the Human Imagination Created the Atlantic World, a study of the role that islands, mythical as well as real, have played in global history from ancient times to the present. See also the PDF of his c.v.
Carl Guarneri is Professor of History at Saint Mary’s College of California, where he arrived in 1979 after teaching at Bates College in Maine. He has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University and a Visiting Professor at University of Paris VIII. Carl’s initial research centered on American utopianism, whose migration from Europe he traced in The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America (1991) and several articles on early socialism and transatlantic reform. He directed an NEH Summer Seminar for School Teachers on major American utopias at St. Mary’s in 1995, 1998, and 2001 and co-directed an earlier version of the 2008 Institute on “Rethinking America in Global Perspective” with John Gillis in 2005. Carl’s interest in comparative and transnational approaches, heightened by overseas travel and teaching, has led him to revamp his U.S. history courses. He is the author of America in the World: United States History in Global Context (2007), a thematic overview intended for undergraduate history courses. He is currently at work on other research projects that will bring a more global perspective to American history. See also the PDF of his c.v.
Guest Faculty Speakers
Thomas Knock
Thomas Knock, associate professor of history at Southern Methodist University, teaches and writes on U.S. foreign policy in the twentieth century. His first book, To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Quest for a New World Order (1992), charted conflicting views of “internationalism” among American policymakers in the Wilsonian era. He is currently writing a biography of Senator George McGovern.
Laurent Dubois
Laurent Dubois is Professor of History at Duke University. He is the author of Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (2004) and A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, published in the same year. The latter work was awarded the Frederick Douglass Book Prize by Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center.
Donna Gabaccia
Donna Gabaccia teaches at the University of Minnesota, where she heads the Immigration History Research Center. She is well known for her pioneering studies of immigration, women, the global Italian diaspora, and, most recently, food ways. She is the author of From the Other Side: Women, Gender, and Immigrant Life in the United States, 1920-1990 (1994), Italy’s Many Diasporas (2000), We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans (1998), and most recently, Immigration and American Diversity (2002).
Eliga Gould
Eliga Gould is Associate Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire. His scholarship bridges America and British history. He is the author of The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (2000) and co-editor of Empire and Nation: The American Revolution and the Atlantic World (2005). He is currently finishing a book, Zones of Law, Zones of Violence, on the American Revolution and the legal geography of the Atlantic world.
Paul Kramer
Paul Kramer currently teaches at the University of Iowa. His work has examined the role of the United States in the Pacific. He is the author of the prize-winning book, Blood of Government: Race and Empire between the United States and the Philippines (2006). He is now researching the international history of racial politics in the 20th century United States .
Elizabeth Mancke
Elizabeth Mancke teaches at the University of Akron. She is the author of Fault Lines of Empire: Political Differentiation in Massachusetts and Nova Scotia, 1760-1830, as well as a study of the Hudson’s Bay Company. She is interested in the spaces of power in the early modern Atlantic world and how these have affected the differing trajectories of the United States and Canada.
Charles C. Mann
Charles Mann is an award-winning science writer whose books have dealt with wide range of evolutionary and historical issues. In 2005 he published 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, a comprehensive treatment of the peoples and environment of the new world prior to the arrival of European settlers. This well-received work provides the backdrop against which the subsequent history of the Americas can be appreciated.
Penny von Eschen
Penny von Eschen is Associate Professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author of two books: Satchmo Blows Up The World: Jazz, Race, and Empire during the Cold War (2004) and Race against Empire: Black American and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957 (1997). Her work illuminates the global relations of American culture and society.
Last Updated: April 9, 2008 11:31 AM