I am Professor of History and Executive Editor of Public Seminar at The New School in Greenwich Village, New York City. I have a passion for writing, teaching, politics, ideas and new media: my newest enterprise is the society and culture podcast, Exiles on 12th Street, produced in collaboration with the podcast team at Public Seminar. You can subscribe at iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I write, speak and teach about the recent political and media history of the United States; gender and sexuality; and Internet studies. My first book was about the making of the FBI during the New Deal, War on Crime: Bandits, G-Men and the Politics of Mass Culture (Rutgers, 1998). Watch this space for my forthcoming book on the history of American political media, Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, June 2020).
My newest book, with Renee Romano, is Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical is Re-staging America’s Past (Rutgers, 2018), a collection of articles about one of the most extraordinary Broadway hits ever for students, scholars and fans. You can order it here. We also edited the collection Doing Recent History: On Privacy, Copyright, Video Games, Institutional Review Boards, Activist Scholarship, and History That Talks Back (University of Georgia Press, 2012).
For almost fifteen years, I have focused on writing for smart people, whether they are academics or thoughtful, ordinary citizens. From 2006 to 2015, I blogged at Tenured Radical: from 2011 to 2015, the blog was hosted at the Chronicle of Higher Education. In addition to the Chronicle, my work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Dissent, Eurozine, The Village Voice, Inside Higher Education, and Jacobin.
I live in New York City and Northampton, Massachusetts. The best way to reach me is by email. I am represented by Roz Foster of the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency, Los Angeles, CA.
Everything not on this site is on my c.v.: download one here if you are really curious.
