The Faculty and Program

Rutgers has pioneered the innovative study of U. S. Cultural and Intellectual History for nearly fifty years. Always the emphasis has been on cultivating awareness of fresh sources and methods as well as connecting creatively with overlapping subfields in the discipline—these days (for example) including the history of science and technology, environmental history, the history of capitalism, religion and culture, and the history of the emotions--as well the department’s established strengths in African-American history, Gender and Sexuality, and Global and Comparative History. Recent dissertations trace the migrations of cultural meaning not only in sermons and speeches but also in soy beans, stereophonic technology, musical ecstasy, and urban reformers’ sensitivity to malodorous neighborhoods.

The faculty include Rachel Devlin, David Greenberg, Jackson Lears, James Livingston, Louis Masur, Jamie Pietruska, and Beryl Satter (Newark). They have written on a wide range of subjects including yearnings for national rebirth after the Civil War; father-daughter relationships in the post World War II era; the uses and misuses of thrift in a consumer society, and the emergence of weather and economic forecasting alongside fortunetelling in the Gilded Age.

Our PhDs have won postdoctoral fellowships and academic appointments at the University of Southern California, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Villanova University, the University of Dayton, Hebrew University, and the University of Virginia, among other places.