Gary GerstleFBA (born 1954) is an American historian and EmeritusPaul Mellon Professor of American History at theUniversity of Cambridge, and an EmeritusFellow ofSidney Sussex College.
Gerstle received hisBA fromBrown University in 1976 and his PhD fromHarvard University in 1982.[1]
Gerstle taught atCatholic University of America andPrinceton University, before moving to theUniversity of Maryland, where he was Director of the Center for Historical Studies (2000–2003) and Chair of the Department of History (2003–2006). He joined the Department of History faculty at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee in 2006. In the 2012/2013 academic year, he was theHarmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at theUniversity of Oxford.[2] From 2014 to 2024, Gerstle was thePaul Mellon Professor of American History at theUniversity of Cambridge.[3][4] In 2026, Gerstle will hold the Kluge Professorship of American Law and Governance at the Library of Congress.[5]
He is one of the United States' leading historians of race, citizenship, and American nationhood.[6] A historian of the twentieth-century United States, he is particularly interested in three major areas of inquiry: 1) immigration, race, and nationality; 2) the significance of class in social and political life; and 3) social movements, popular politics, and the state. Gerstle is the author, co-author, or co-editor of six books and the author of more than thirty articles on these topics.[7]
He has served as the Annenberg Visiting Professor at theUniversity of Pennsylvania and as a visiting professor at theSchool for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (École des hautes études en sciences sociales aka EHESS) in Paris. In addition to France, he has lectured throughout the United States and in Canada, England, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Brazil, Japan, and South Africa. Gerstle has also lectured widely to the general public, and is often consulted by newspaper reporters, magazine writers, and television producers on matters pertinent to his areas of historical expertise. In May 2007, Gerstle testified on questions of immigration before the Immigration Subcommittee of theHouse Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill.[7]
He also co-edits a book series, Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America, which has published more than thirty books, many of them prizewinners.[8] He has served on the editorial board of theJournal of American History and the Board of Editors of theAmerican Historical Review. He is a member of the Editorial Board forPast & Present.[9]
His book,American Crucible, received the 2001 Theodore Saloutos Memorial Book Award for outstanding book on US immigration and ethnic history,[10] and was named by NPR book critic,Maureen Corrigan, one of 2008's Best Books for a Transformative New Year.[11] He has received numerous fellowships, including a John SimonGuggenheim Memorial Fellowship, aNational Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and a Membership at theInstitute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.[citation needed]
He was elected to theSociety of American Historians in 2005,[12] and named a Distinguished Lecturer of theOrganization of American Historians in 2007. In July 2017, he was elected aFellow of the British Academy (FBA), the United Kingdom'snational academy for the humanities andsocial sciences.[13]
| External videos | |
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 Did Communism Give Us the New Deal Order? w/ Gary Gerstle onYouTube |
