James T. Kloppenberg

James T. Kloppenberg is Charles Warren Professor of American History at Harvard and a Fellow Commoner of Jesus College, Cambridge. At Harvard he has won the Levinson teaching prize awarded by the Harvard Undergraduate Council and has been selected seven times by Harvard graduating classes as one of their favorite professors. He has served as the Pitt Professor of American History at the University of Cambridge and as a visiting professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. His Stanford dissertation became his first book, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870-1920 (1986), which was awarded the Merle Curti Prize in intellectual history by the Organization of American Historians. His most recent book, Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition (2nd ed., 2011), was featured in the New York Times, named 2010 book of the year by NPR White House Correspondent Mara Liasson, and led to interviews with Charlie Rose and with journalists from Austria to Australia. His political commentaries have been published in newspapers and magazines in the US, Europe, and Japan. He has written about the rise and fall of social democracy in Europe and America; American politics and ideas from the seventeenth century to the present; the American philosophy of pragmatism; European observers of America from Tocqueville through Weber; and the relation between contemporary critical theory and historical writing. He will be speaking on his current work, which includes Tragic Irony: The Rise of Democracy in European and American Thought (forthcoming in 2015 from Oxford University Press); and The American Democratic Tradition: Roger Williams to Barack Obama (under contract with Princeton University Press).