Education

PhD, United States History, University of California, Berkeley, 2011
BA, Modern History, King's College, Cambridge University, 2004
BA, History and Philosophy, Columbia College, Columbia University, 2002

Employment

I am currently a research scholar at Columbia University's Committee on Global Thought. In the fall of 2012 I will join Northwestern University's department of history as an assistant professor.

Research interests

My research has centered around three themes: the history of the United States in the world, intellectual history, and the history of capitalism. In addition, I am interested in the methodological aspects of teaching and writing history. My dissertation was entitled "Quests for Community: The United States, Community Development, and the World, 1935-1965" and is now being revised as a book manuscript. I am also working on a second project about U.S. power in the Pacific,  particularly in relation to its territories and occupied zones, in the 1940s.

Events this semester (spring 2012) at Columbia with which I am involved

Jan. 25th, 7:30pm, Faculty House, Columbia University.
Daniel Immerwahr, "The Pivot of the World: U.S. Power in the Pacific in the 1940s," Columbia University Seminar on Twentieth-Century Politics and Society.

Jan. 26th, 6:15-8:15pm, Heyman Center, 2nd floor common room.
Nick Cullather will talk about his prizewinning book, The Hungry World, Heyman Center for the Humanities.

Feb. 17th, 10:00am-4:30pm, Heyman Center, 2nd floor common room.
"Development Policies in a Bipolar World," two panels about development during the Cold War, featuring David Engerman, Joseph Hodge, Daniel Immerwahr, Amy Offner, George Rosen, and Bradley Simpson, Heyman Center for the Humanities.

March 8th, 6:15pm, Davis Auditorium, Schapiro Center
"Debt: The Long View," public discussion featuring David Graeber, Louis Hyman, and Greta Krippner, moderated by Peter Godman, Committee on Global Thought and Heyman Center for the Humanities.

March 21st, 4:00-6:00pm, Heyman Center, 2nd floor common room.
"Development and Empire," workshop featuring Fred Cooper, David Engerman, and Julian Go, Committee on Global Thought and Heyman Center for the Humanities.

April 25th, Heyman Center, 2nd floor common room.
Conference on the Core, featuring Robert Taylor, Daniel Immerwahr, Andrew Jewett, and Elizabeth Sawyer, Heyman Center for the Humanities.

Research publications

"Polanyi in the United States: Peter Drucker, Karl Polanyi, and the Midcentury Critique of Economic Society," Journal of the History of Ideas 70 (2009): 445-466. A Japanese translation of this article has been published in Gendai shiso 38 (2010): 141-159.

"The Fact/Narrative Distinction and Student Examinations in History," The History Teacher 41 (2008): 199-206 (click here for preprint).

"Caste or Colony?: Indianizing Race in the United States," Modern Intellectual History 4 (2007): 275-301.

"The Politics of Architecture and Urbanism in Postcolonial Lagos, 1960-1986," Journal of African Cultural Studies 19 (2007): 165-186 (click here for preprint).

"History and the Sciences," co-authored with Philip Kitcher, in Action, Art, History: Engagements with Arthur Danto, ed. Daniel Herwitz and Michael Kelly (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 198-226. To be reprinted in Explanation in the Special Sciences: The Case of Biology and History, ed. Andreas Hutterman, Oliver Scholz, and Marie I. Kaiser (New York: Springer, forthcoming).

Book reviews

Joint review of David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order and Nick Cullather, The Hungry World: America's Cold War Battle against Poverty in Cold War Asia, forthcoming in Agricultural History.

Review of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of An American Original, by Robin D. G. Kelley, The Sixties 3 (2010): 247-249 (click here for preprint).

Teaching

I am currently teaching a graduate seminar on the history of international development. I have also taught and worked as a teaching assistant for numerous courses in history, American Studies, and philosophy at UC Berkeley and San Quentin State Prison (via the Prison University Project). One course whose syllabus is online is my senior seminar in U.S. intellectual history. I have also worked for the UC Berkeley History-Social Studies Project and the Stanford History Education Group on bringing academic knowledge into the high-school classroom.

Other projects

My website, The Books of the Century, lists bestsellers, Book-of-the-Month Club selections, and other notable books for every year of the twentieth century. The New Yorker (well, one of the magazine's blogs) called it "a brilliant blend of aggregation and curation."

I designed a series of grade calculators and rosters that students can use to find and predict their grades and teachers can use to record and calculate course averages.

A copy of my CV is available here.