Matthew Pratt Guterl
- Associate Professor, African American and African Diaspora Studies
- Adjunct Associate Professor, Department of History
- Director, American Studies Program
Education
- B.A. at Richard Stockton College, 1993
- Ph.D. at Rutgers University, 1999
Contact Information
| Ballantine Hall, Rm. 522 |
| Memorial Hall East, Rm. M35 |
| (812) 855-7525 |
Background
I am a historian of race and race-relations in the United States, the Americas, and the world. My first book - featuring biographical portraits of Jean Toomer, Madison Grant, Daniel Cohalan, and W.E.B. Dubois - explored the changing systems of racial classification in New York City during the early 20th century. My second book considers the Southern master class in excile and in diaspora, and challenges the power of the nation-state to frame the histories of racial division. I am currently at work on two separate book projects: a biography of Josephine Baker, focusing on her adopted family, and a history of the visual culture of race - that is, the way we have seen race on the body.
Selected Awards
- Best Book of 2001 on the Social Construction of Race and Ethnicity, American Political Science Association
Research Interests
- Histories of race, nation, slavery, emancipation, and empire
Courses Recently Taught
- Struggles Against Jim Crow and Apartheid (HIST A100; AAAD A165)
- Variations on Blackness (AAAD A602/3; CMCL G641/2)
Publication Highlights
Books
American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation (Harvard University Press, 2008)
Race, Nation, and Empire in American History, co-edited with James T. Campbell and Robert Lee (UNC, 2007).
The Color of Race in America, 1900-1940 (Harvard University Press, 2001).
Articles
“’I Went to the West Indies’: Race, Place, and the Antebellum South,” American Literary History (forthcoming, 2006).
“Atlantic & Pacific Crossings: Race, Empire, and the ‘Labor Problem’ in the Nineteenth Century,” co-authored with Christine Skwiot, Radical History Review (Winter 2005): 40-61.