Matthew Pratt Guterl
- Chair and Rudy Professor, Department of American Studies
- Rudy Professor, Department of History
Education
- B.A. at Richard Stockton College, 1993
- Ph.D. at Rutgers University, 1999
Contact Information
|
| Ballantine Hall, Rm. 522 |
| (812) 855-7805 |
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 exile 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 critique of the visual culture of race - that is, the way we have seen race on the body.
Selected Awards
- Visiting Fellowship, Humanities Research Center, Rice University, Spring 2010
- Best Book of 2001 on the Social Construction of Race and Ethnicity, American Political Science Association
- Postdoctoral Fellowship, Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, Brown University, 2001-2003
- Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship, the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 2001
- Associate Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Slavery, Abolition, and Resistance Program, Gilder Lehrman Center, Yale University, 2001
Research Interests
- Histories of race, nation, slavery, emancipation, and empire
Courses Recently Taught
- AMST-A 100 What is America?
- AAAD-A 154 History of Race in the Americas
- AAAD-A 354 Transnational Americas
- AAAD-A 503 Afro-Guyana
Publication Highlights
Works in Progress:
Mother of the World: Josephine Baker and the Rainbow Tribe (book length manuscript under contract with Harvard University Press, due 2012).
Discrimination: Seeing Race in American Culture (book length manuscript under contract with the University of North Carolina Press, due 2011).
Books
American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008) Honorable Mention, 2009 Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Award, Caribbean Studies Association.
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). Named the Best Book of 2001 on the History of Race and Ethnicity by the American Political Science Association.
Articles
"Josephine Baker's 'Rainbow Tribe': Radical Motherhood in the South of France," Journal of Women's History 21.4 (2009): 38-58.
“’I Went to the West Indies’: Race, Place, and the Antebellum South,” American Literary History 18.3 (Fall 2006): 446-467.
