Cultural Studies Adjunct: Matthew Guterl
I am a historian of race, nation and empire in the world. My first book, The Color of Race in America (2001) explained how and why American racial classifications were transformed in the early twentieth century, with the near complete eclipse of nation-based racial identities by skin color. My second book, American Mediterranean (2008), considered Southern slaveholders as hemispherically-minded creoles, fearfully linked to the Caribbean in the age of emancipation. My current projects include a biography of Josephine Baker's adopted family - the "Rainbow Tribe" of the 1950s and 1960s - and a book on the visual culture of race, focusing on how we have historically imagined racial difference on the body.