Gary Gerstle

Gary Gerstle is an American historian and academic. He is the Paul Mellon Professor of American History at Cambridge University, and a fellow of Sidney Sussex College.

Early life

Gary Gerstle received his BA from Brown University in 1976 and his PhD from Harvard University in 1982.

Academic career

He taught at the University of Maryland, where he was Director of the Center for Historical Studies (2000–2003) and Chair of the Department of History (2003–2006). He taught at Catholic University of America and Princeton University prior to his position at Maryland. He joined the Department of History faculty at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee in 2006. In the 2012/2013 academic year, he was the Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at the University of Oxford. As of October 2014, he is Paul Mellon Professor of American History at the University of Cambridge.

He is one of the nation's leading historians of race, citizenship and American nationhood. A historian of the twentieth-century United States, he is particularly interested in three major areas of inquiry: 1) immigration, race, and nationality; 2) the significance of class in social and political life; 3) and social movements, popular politics, and the state. Gerstle is the author, co-author, and co-editor of six books and the author of more than thirty articles on these topics.

He has served as the Annenberg Visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and as a Visiting Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociale in Paris. In addition to France, he has lectured throughout the United States and in Canada, England, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Brazil, Japan, and South Africa. Gerstle has also lectured widely to the general public, and is often consulted by newspaper reporters, magazine writers, and television producers on matters pertinent to his areas of historical expertise. In May 2007, Gerstle testified on questions of immigration before the Immigration Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill.

He also co-edits a book series, Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America, which has published more than thirty books, many of them prizewinners. He has served on the editorial board of the Journal of American History and the Board of Editors of the American Historical Review.

Honors

His book, American Crucible, received the 2001 Theodore Saloutos Memorial Book Award for outstanding book on U. S. Immigration and Ethnic History and was named by NPR book critic, Maureen Corrigan, one of 2008's Best Books for a Transformative New Year. He has received numerous fellowships, including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and a Membership at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

He was elected to the Society of American Historians in 2005 and named a Distinguished Lecturer of the Organization of American Historians in 2007.

Books

Solely Authored Works

• Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914–1960 (Cambridge, 1989; 2nd edition with a new preface: Princeton, 2002)
• American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 2001)
• Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present (Princeton, 2015)

Co-authored and Co-edited Works

• The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980, with Steve Fraser (Princeton, 1989)
• E Pluribus Unum: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives on Immigrant Political Incorporation, with John H. Mollenkopf (Russell Sage, 2001)
• Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy, with Steve Fraser (Harvard, 2005)
• Liberty, Equality, and Power, with John Murrin, Paul Johnson, James McPherson, Alice Fahs, Emily Rosenberg, and Norman Rosenberg (Cengage/Wadsworth, in its 6th edition, 2011)

External links

• Gary Gerstle's faculty page at Vanderbilt University
• Vanderbilt History Seminar
• American Crucible as one of NPR book critic Maureen Corrigan's 2008 Best Books for a Transformative New Year
• Princeton University Press book series, Politics and Society in Twentieth Century America