Editorial Board
Editors of the ANB | Advisory Editors
Editors of the ANB
General Editor: Susan Ware
Susan Ware became the General Editor of American National Biography in 2012. She is an accomplished historian, editor, and the author of eight books, including biographies of Billie Jean King, Amelia Earhart, Molly Dewson, and Mary Margaret McBride. Her most recent book is American Women’s History: A Very Short Introduction (2015). She served as the editor of several documentary collections as well as the biographical dictionary Notable American Women: Completing the Twentieth Century (2004).Educated at Wellesley College and Harvard University, Ware taught at New York University and Harvard. She has long been associated with the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, where she currently serves as the Honorary Women’s Suffrage Centennial Historian.
Research Editor: Rob Heinrich
Rob Heinrich is the research editor of the American National Biography. He is a non-resident fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. Heinrich holds a PhD in American History from Brandeis University and is the author, with Deborah Harding, of From Slave to Statesman: The Life of Educator, Editor, and Civil Rights Activist Willis M. Carter of Virginia(2017).
Advisory Editors
Labor: Eric Arnesen
Eric Arnesen is the James R. Hoffa Teamsters Professor of Modern American Labor History and Executive Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs in George Washington University’s Columbian College of Arts and Sciences. His scholarly work focuses on issues of race, labor, politics, and civil rights. In his book, Brotherhoods of Color, he explored traditions of black trade unionism and labor activism, white union racial ideologies and practices, and workplace race relations. In various essays, he has debated the uses of the concept of “whiteness” in American history, the character of black anti-communism, and the utility of the “long civil rights movement” framework. His current project is a political biography of the civil rights and labor leader A. Philip Randolph. A former president of The Historical Society, Arnesen teaches courses on modern US history, American labor history, and race and public policy. His reviews have appeared in the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and the Boston Globe and his review essays have appeared in The New Republic, Dissent, and Historically Speaking. In 2006, he held the Distinguished Fulbright Chair at the Swedish Institute for North American Studies at Uppsala University in Sweden and in 2011-2012 he was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He is currently co-chair of the Washington History Seminar at the Wilson Center.
Southern History: Raymond Arsenault
Raymond Arsenault is the John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History and Chairman of the Department of History and Politics at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg, where he has taught since 1980. A specialist in the political, social, environmental, and civil rights history of the American South, he has also taught at the University of Minnesota, Brandeis University, the University of Chicago, the Florida State University Study Abroad Center in London, and the Universite d’Angers, in France. Arsenault is the author or editor of eight books, including The Wild Ass of the Ozarks: Jeff Davis and the Social Bases of Southern Politics (1984); Crucible of Liberty: 200 Years of the Bill of Rights (1991); Paradise Lost? The Environmental History of Florida (2005), co-edited with Jack E. Davis; Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice (2006; abridged ed. 2011); and The Sound of Freedom: Marian Anderson, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Concert That Awakened America (2009). Freedom Riders was named a New York Times Editor’s Choice, selected as one of the Washington Post BookWorld’s Best Books of the Year, and awarded the 2007 Frank L. and Harriet C. Owsley Prize of the Southern Historical Association, as the most important book published in the field of Southern history in 2006. The abridged version is the companion volume to the acclaimed American Experience documentary film Freedom Riders, which won three Emmys for writing, editing, and documentary excellence, and a 2012 George Peabody Award. Arsenault is currently writing a biography of the legendary African-American tennis star and public intellectual Arthur Ashe.
Art and Art Collectors and Dealers: Miguel de Baca
Miguel de Baca is an associate professor of modern and contemporary art history at Lake Forest College. Prof. de Baca earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2009 in the History of American Civilization. His scholarly work has been supported by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Dumbarton Oaks, and the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History. His book, Memory Work: Anne Truitt and Sculpture was published in 2015, and considers issues of reference and abstraction in the career of the pioneering minimalist sculptor, Anne Truitt. De Baca is a reviewer for Yale University Press and contributes to trade journals such as Artforum and Art in Print, and he is the 2017-18 Terra Foundation Visiting Professor of American Art at the University of Oxford.
Engineering and Computer Science: Amy Sue Bix
Amy Sue Bix is Professor of History at Iowa State University and director of ISU’s Center for Historical Studies of Technology and Science. Her book in progress is Recruiting Engineer Jane and Astrophysicist Amy: American STEM Advocacy for Girls, 1965-2015. Bix’s 2013 book Girls Coming to Tech!: A History of American Engineering Education for Women won the 2015 Margaret W. Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize from the History of Science Society. Bix has published a number of articles, book chapters, and essays connected to her specialty in the history of women and gender in science, technology, and medicine. She also publishes in the broader history of science, technology, and medicine, including her book Inventing Ourselves Out of Jobs?: America's Debate over Technological Unemployment, 1929-1981 (2000) and The Future is Now: Science and Technology Policy in America Since 1950, co-authored with Alan Marcus (2007).
Religion and Spirituality: Ann Braude
Ann Braude serves as the director of the Women's Studies in Religion Program and as Senior Lecturer on American Religious History at Harvard Divinity School. Her primary interest is the religious history of American women. Her first book, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-century America (1989), explores the engagement between the women's rights movement and the religious movement focused on contact with spirits of the dead. Ann Braude is also the author of Sisters and Saints: Women and American Religion (2007), a history of the religion of American women for a general audience. She also has an interest in the issues surrounding the study of Native American religions, and is engaged in an ongoing research project concerning a Cheyenne child taken captive at the Sand Creek Massacre. She has published many articles on women in Judaism, Christian Science, and American religious life, and served as co-editor of Root of Bitterness: Documents of the Social History of American Women. She edited Transforming the Faiths of Our Fathers: The Women Who Changed American Religion, the result of a historic conference that brought 25 pioneers of religious feminism together at HDS. In 2005 she inaugurated the School's year-long celebration of the 50th anniversary of the admission of women to HDS with a convocation address entitled "A Short Half-Century: Fifty Years of Women at Harvard Divinity School." Gendering Religion and Politics: Untangling Modernity, which she co-edited with Hanna Herzog, appeared in 2009.
Latino/Chicano History: Miroslava Chávez-García
Miroslava Chávez-García is Professor in the Department of History at the University of California at Santa Barbara and holds affiliate status in the Departments of Chicana and Chicano Studies and Feminist Studies. She is author of States of Delinquency: Race and Science in the Making of California’s Juvenile Justice System (2012) and Negotiating Conquest: Gender and Power in California, 1770s to 1880s (2004). Her book manuscript, “Migrant Longing: Letter Writing Across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands,” is a history of migration, courtship, and identity as told through 300 personal letters exchanged among family members in the 1960s and 1970s. The book will appear in spring 2018. She is also co-authoring A Chicana & Chicano History of the United States (under contract with Beacon Press) with Professor Lorena Oropeza. Professor Chávez-García has received awards and fellowships from the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University, Ford Foundation for Diversity, and Organization of American History (OAH) and the Committee for the Germany Residency Program, which awarded her the residency at the University of Tuebingen. Most recently, in April 2017, the Western Association of Women's Historians awarded her the Judith Lee Ridge prize for the best article by any member of the organization for “Migrant Longing, Courtship, and Gendered Identity in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands,” published by the Western History Quarterly in Summer 2016.
Political Activism and Social Movements: Rob Heinrich
Rob Heinrich is the research editor of the American National Biography. He is a non-resident fellow at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. Heinrich holds a PhD in American History from Brandeis University and is the author, with Deborah Harding, of From Slave to Statesman: The Life of Educator, Editor, and Civil Rights Activist Willis M. Carter of Virginia (2017).
Western History: Anne Hyde
Anne Hyde is Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma. She edits the Western Historical Quarterly and is an expert on the 19th North American West. She is the author of Empires, Nations, and Families: A New History of the American West, 1800-1860 (2012), winner of the Bancroft Prize and Pulitzer finalist.
Music: Barry Kernfeld
A freelance musicologist and reed player, Barry Kernfeld was editor-in-chief for the two editions of The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz (1988 and 2001), which became the standard reference source in the field. In the interim Yale University Press commissioned him to write What to Listen For in Jazz (1995) as a parallel to Aaron Copland's What to Listen For in Music. Kernfeld's subsequent monographs concern music bootlegging: The Story of Fake Books (2005) and Pop Song Piracy (2011). In retirement he is the archivist at Historic Beverly (Massachusetts) and an advisor on music-other-than-classical for ANB, while ironically attending nothing but classical concerts in Boston and Cambridge.
Psychiatry: Elizabeth Lunbeck
Elizabeth Lunbeck is Professor of the History of Science in Residence at Harvard University, where she teaches courses in the history of psychoanalysis, psychiatry, and the psychotherapies. She is the author of a number of books, including most recently The Americanization of Narcissism (2014) and, with Lorraine Daston, Histories of Scientific Observation (2011), and has written widely on the history of the personality disorders. Before joining the Harvard faculty, Lunbeck taught at the University of Rochester (2 years), Princeton (18 years), and, most recently, Vanderbilt, where she was Chair of the history department.
Business, Finance, and Industry: Stephen Mihm
Stephen Mihm is the author of A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (2007); and the co-author, with Nouriel Roubini, of Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance (2010), which was named as one of the "Top Ten Books of 2010" by the New York Times. He is also the co-editor, with Katherine Ott and David Serlin, of Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics (2002); and the editor of The Life of P.T. Barnum (Bedford/St. Martin's, forthcoming). He is also the author of a number of peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, and academic essays. During the 2017-2018 academic year, Mihm will take up residence as the Arthur Molella Distinguished Fellow at the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, Smithsonian Institution. In previous years, Mihm has been the recipient of numerous fellowships, awards, and grants, including the biennial Harold F. Williamson Prize, given to a mid-career scholar for contributions to the teaching and writing of business history; a two-year, $188,000 grant from the National Science Foundation; and the History Department's Parks Heggoy Graduate Teaching Award in both 2012 and 2014. He has also received a number of major fellowships from, among other institutions, the American Council of Learned Societies; the Library Company of Philadelphia; and the Harvard Business School, where he served as the Newcomen Postdoctoral Fellowship in Business History in 2003-2004.
Science and Technology: Cyrus Mody
Cyrus Mody is Professor and Chair in the History of Science, Technology, and Innovation at the University of Maastricht. His research focuses on physical and engineering scientists in the United States during the late Cold War and early post-Cold War eras. Themes running through is work include the histories of: commercialization of academic research; interdisciplinarity; nanoscale science and technology; responsible research and innovation; countercultural science and technology; and alternative energy. He is the author of Instrumental Community: Probe Microscopy and the Path to Nanotechnology (2011) and The Long Arm of Moore’s Law: Microelectronics and American Science (2017). He is currently working on a monograph tentatively entitled Through Change and through Storm: American Physical and Engineering Scientists in the Long 1970s.
Civics and Philanthropy: Maribel Morey
Maribel Morey is an Assistant Professor of History at Clemson University and an Andrew Carnegie Fellow during the 2016-18 academic years. A twentieth-century U.S. historian and historian of U.S. philanthropy, she is working on a two-part book project on elite philanthropy and the African American experience during the span of the twentieth century. She is also co-editor of HistPhil, a web publication on the history of the philanthropic and nonprofit sectors.
Literature: Ira Nadel
Educated at Rutgers and Cornell, Ira Nadel is Professor of English at the Univ. of British Columbia, Vancouver, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He is the author of Joyce and the Jews, Modernisms Second Act and The Cambridge Introduction to Ezra Pound. He has also written biographies of Leonard Cohen, Tom Stoppard, David Mamet, and Leon Uris. His most recent articles deal with Beckett and photography, and Philip Roth and swimming. He is currently completing a critical life of Philip Roth and a series of essays dealing with Katherine Mansfield and dance, and Virginia Woolf and Russia.
Native American History: Katherine M. B. Osburn
Katherine M. B. Osburn is an ethnohistorian focusing on gender, race, political activism, and identity. She has published articles on the Navajos, the Southern Utes, and the Mississippi Choctaws in a variety of scholarly journals and edited collections. Her first monograph, Southern Ute Women: Autonomy and Assimilation on the Reservation, 1885-1934 (1998), analyzed how Ute women responded to gendered assimilationist policies and is in its second edition. Her second monograph, Choctaw Resurgence in Mississippi: Race, Class, and Nation Building in the Jim Crow South, 1830-1977 (2014),examines Choctaw identity formation and performance in political activism. She is currently working on a study of the relationship between Arizona's Indigenous nations and their elected officials tentatively titled Indigenous Citizens.
Psychology: Alexandra Rutherford
Alexandra Rutherford is a professor of psychology in the Historical, Theoretical, and Critical Studies of Psychology graduate program at York University in Toronto. Her work focuses on the history of feminist-scholar activism in psychology and its impact on society. She is the founder and director of the Psychology’s Feminist Voices Oral History and Digital Archive Project (http://www.feministvoices.com/), which documents, preserves, and promotes the contributions of women and feminism in psychology. She is a fellow of the American Psychological Association (APA) and the Canadian Psychological Association (CPA). In 2012 she won the Distinguished Publication Award from the Association for Women in Psychology (AWP) for her co-edited volume Handbook of International Feminisms: Perspectives on Psychology, Women, Culture, and Rights. She has co-authored two textbooks on the history of psychology and is an associate editor of the APA Handbook of the Psychology of Women. In 2013, she served as president of the Society for the History of Psychology and is currently a member of the advisory board of the Cummings Center for the History of Psychology at the University of Akron.
Architecture: Andrew Shanken
Andrew Shanken is Professor in the Department of Architecture, U.C. Berkeley. His book, 194X: Architecture, Planning, and Consumer Culture on the American Homefront (2009), examines anticipatory architecture on the American homefront. Into the Void Pacific (2015) is an architectural history of the 1939 San Francisco World’s Fair. He also publishes on the topic of architecture and memory, conservation planning, keywords in architecture, and the imagery of urban planning.
Social work: Paul H. Stuart
Paul H. Stuart is a Professor in the School of Social Work, Robert Stempel College of Public Health and Social Work, Florida International University, Miami, where he teaches courses in social welfare policy and services. He earned an MSW from the University of California, Berkeley and a Ph.D. in History and Social Welfare from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He was a social worker for the Indian Health Service on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota and previously taught at Augustana and Sioux Falls Colleges in South Dakota, Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, and the University of Alabama. A social welfare historian, he has prepared several bibliographies on the history of social work and social welfare for Oxford Bibliographies in Social Work and co-edited, with John M. Herrick, the Encyclopedia of Social Welfare History in North America (2005). He is the Archives Editor for the Journal of Community Practice and has contributed several “From the Archives” articles for that journal. He has written several books, journal articles, and book chapters on U.S. Indian policy, the settlement house movement, and the history of social work practice and education. His most recent articles are on the history of financial capability practice in social work and on social workers’ response to the 1916 polio epidemic, with Laurel Iverson Hitchcock.
Military and Intelligence Operations: Jonathan Reed Winkler
Jonathan Reed Winkler is professor of history and Chair of the Department of History at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. He is a historian of U.S. diplomatic, military and naval history, and international affairs in the modern era. A native of Ohio and graduate of Ohio University (1997, Phi Beta Kappa), he has studied at the universities of Edinburgh and Salamanca. He received his PhD. from Yale University (2004). He is the author of Nexus: Strategic Communications and American Security in World War I (Harvard, 2008), winner of the Paul Birdsall Prize of the American Historical Association among other prizes. His articles, commentaries and reviews have appeared in Diplomatic History, The Journal of Military History, the Naval War College Review, and other venues. His current research project is an analysis of how the United States government coordinated commercial and military communications networks to meet transforming strategic interests across the entire 20th century.
Education: Jackie Blount
Jackie Blount is Professor of Educational Studies at the Ohio State University, where she teaches courses on the history of schools, higher education, and educational leadership. She is the author of Fit to Teach: Same-Sex Desire, Gender, and School Work in the Twentieth Century (2005), Destined to Rule the Schools: Women and the Superintendency, 1873-1995 (1998), other books, and numerous articles and chapters on gender and sexuality in education history. She is currently completing a biography of Ella Flagg Young, Chicago’s superintendent during the early twentieth century. In 2016 she served as President of the History of Education Society.
Asian American History: Shelley Lee
Shelley Lee is an associate professor of History and the chair of Comparative American Studies at Oberlin College. Her research interests include immigration, race, and ethnicity and her books include A New History of Asian America (Routledge 2013) and Claiming the Oriental Gateway: Prewar Seattle and Japanese America (Temple 2011).
Physicians and Healthcare Activists: Susan E. Lederer
Susan E. Lederer is the Robert Turell Professor of History of Medicine and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health and Professor of History. A historian of American medicine and public health, she has published widely on the history of research involving humans and animals, cultural understandings of organ transplantation and blood transfusion, and the development of bioethics. Her books include Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America Before the Second World War (1995), Frankenstein: Penetrating the Secrets of Nature (2002), and Flesh and Blood: Organ Transplantation and Blood Transfusion in 20th Century America (2008). She is currently serves as President of the American Association for the History of Medicine.
Journalism: Tracy Lucht
Tracy Lucht is an associate professor at the Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication at Iowa State University. She holds a Ph.D. from the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland and is an expert on the history, experiences, and representations of women in the media. Dr. Lucht is the author of Sylvia Porter: America’s Original Personal Finance Columnist (Syracuse University Press, 2013) and co-author of Mad Men and Working Women: Feminist Perspectives on Historical Power, Resistance, and Otherness (Peter Lang, 2014). Her recent biographical research focuses on the gendered professional strategies of American women journalists. Dr. Lucht has worked at USA Today, The Washington Post and The Des Moines Register.
Law and Criminology: Joanna Grisinger
Joanna Grisinger is Associate Professor of Instruction at Northwestern University’s Center for Legal Studies, where she teaches courses on legal history and socio-legal studies. She is a legal historian with a focus on the modern American administrative state. Her first book, The Unwieldy American State: Administrative Politics Since the New Deal (Cambridge University Press, 2012), offers a political history of administrative law reform. Her current research explores the participation of civil rights, anti-apartheid, and environmental activists in administrative decision making.
African-American History: Brandon Byrd
Brandon R. Byrd is an Assistant Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. His research focuses on nineteenth and twentieth-century Black intellectual and social history, with a special interest in Black internationalism. He is the author of The Black Republic: African Americans and the Fate of Haiti.
