John Stauffer

John Stauffer writes and lectures on the Civil War era, antislavery, social protest movements, and visual culture.  He is the author of seven books and more than 45 articles, including The Black Hearts of Men:  Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (2002), which won four major awards, including the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, the Avery Craven Book Award, and the Lincoln Prize runner-up.  His essays have appeared in Time Magazine, Raritan, New York Post, 21^st: The Journal of Contemporary Photography, and The Harvard Review; and he has appeared on national radio and television shows.  His new book, GIANTS: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, was published in November 2008 by TWELVE. More information about his books can be found at http://www.johnstauffer.org.

Currently, John is completing a book with Sally Jenkins on radical interracialism and Unionism in Civil War era Mississippi.  The story, Free State of Jones, will appear as a major motion picture by the filmmaker Gary Ross, with whom John served as a scholarly consultant.

John received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1999, began teaching at Harvard that year, and was tenured in 2004.  He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife, Deborah Cunningham, and their two-year-old son, Erik Isaiah Stauffer.

Professor Stauffer is serving, and/or has served, on the following American Civilization dissertation committee(s):

“‘Heard It on the Radio’: Automobile Radio and American Culture” (Aaron Hatley)

“The Importance of Biography in Antebellum American Literature” (Jacob Spencer)

“Through the Looking Glass Darkly: Episodes from the History of Deviance” (Altin Gavranovic)

“‘If you see something, say something’: Islamism, Threat and Individual Rights in Two Liberal Democracies, France and the U.S. since 1976” (Catherine Romatowski)

“Domestic Pleasures: Dreams of Joy and Fulfillment in American Home Life” (Phyllis Thompson)

"Slavery and the Civil War in American Cultural Memory"  (Christina Adkins)

"American Whaling in Culture and Memory, 1820-1930" (Jamie L. Jones)

"Object Lessons in American Culture" (Sarah Carter)

"Like Me: Identity Immersion Journalism and the Dilemmas of Self-Making" (Sara Gebhardt)

“To the Heart of Europe: Americanism, the Salzburg Seminar, and Cultural Diplomacy” (George Blaustein)

“The Reusable Past: Abolitionist Aesthetics in the Protest Literature of the Long Civil Rights Movement” (Zoe Trodd)

“‘Social Intercession’: The Religious Nature of Public Activism among American Women Reformers in Boston, 1892 to 1930” (Lauren Brandt)

“Carrying the Mill: Steam, Waterpower and New England Textile Mills in the 19th Century” (Marti Frank)

“‘Ain’t Got No Home’: Race and American Narratives in the Depression Era” (Erin Royston Battat)

“Performing History: History and Politics in the Works of Suzan-Lori Parks, Anna Deavere Smith, Naomi Wallace, and Charles Mee” (Talaya Delaney)

“Figurations of Catastrophe: The Poetics and Politics of AIDS Loss” (Dagmawi Woubshet)

“The Nervous American” (Kevin Burke)

“History, Memory, and Myth: Children’s Literature and Classroom Conceptions of the Past” (Sara Schwebel)

“‘An American Type’: The Kikuchi Diaries, A Cultural Biography (1941-1947)” (Matthew Briones)

“Back to the Blanket: The Indian Fiction of Oliver La Farge, John Joseph Mathews, D’Arcy McNickle, Ruth Underhill, and Frank Waters, 1927-1944” (Nancy Elam Squires)

“Forging Memory, Hereditary Societies: Patriotism and the American Past, 1876-1898” (Woden Teachout)

·   http://johnstauffer.org
·   Contact information: Department of English