• T.J. Jackson Lears
  • T.J. Jackson Lears
  • Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of History; and Editor-in-Chief, Raritan: a Quarterly Review
  • Degree: Ph.D., Yale
  • Additional Degree(s): M.A., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill B.A., University of Virginia
  • Rutgers : At Rutgers since 1986
  • Specialty: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century US: Cultural History
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  • Office: Raritan Quarterly Office Building, 31 Mine Street, Room 201
  • Phone: 848-932-7887

 

RESEARCH INTERESTS

U. S. cultural and intellectual history, comparative religious history, literature and the visual arts, folklore and folk beliefs

COURSES REGULARLY TAUGHT

Undergraduate

  • 506:401 History Seminar: Luck and the American Imagination
  • 510:374 Cultural History of the U. S. in the 20th Century
  • 510:372 American Thought since 1850

Graduate

  • 510:543 Seminar in U.S. Cultural History
  • 510:561 Colloquium in U.S. Cultural History: Fictions of Modernity

PUBLICATIONS

  • Rebirth of a Nation, the Making of Modern America, 1877-1920  (Harper Collins, 2009)
  • Something for Nothing: Luck in America (New York: Viking Penguin, 2003)
  • Fables of Abundance: a Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994)
  • The Power of Culture: Critical Essays in American history (co-editor, University of Chicago Press, 1993)
  • The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American history, 1880-1980 (co-editor, New York: Pantheon Books, 1983)
  • No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981; reissued by University of Chicago Press, 1994; Japanese translation by Shohakusha Publishing, 2011)
  • Essays and reviews in the American Historical Review, American Quarterly,and the Journal of American History; a regular contributor to The New Republic, The Nation, The London Review of Books, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, among other publications and scholarly journals

AWARDS

  • The Public Humanities Award (for “making ideas current”) from the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, 2003
  • Los Angeles Times Book Award in History and NJ-NEH Book Award for Fables of Abundance, 1995
  • National Book Critics Circle Award nomination for No Place of Grace, 1981
  • Fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Winterthur Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Shelby Cullom Davis Center at Princeton University.

PROFESSIONAL AFFILIATIONS

  • Elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2009
  • American Historical Association
  • American Studies Association
  • Organization of American Historians