Author Bio
JOHN STAUFFER is Chair of the History of American Civilization and Professor of English and African American Studies at Harvard University. Having received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1999, he is one of the world’s leading scholars of antislavery, social protest, interracialism, and the dilemmas of self-making. He is the author or editor of seven books, including The Black Hearts of Men, which won four major awards, including the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, the Avery Craven Book Award, and the 2nd place Lincoln Prize. He has been on national radio and television shows, and his work has appeared in Time Magazine, Raritan, New York Post, The New York Times Book Review, Chronicle of Higher Education, Reviews in American History, 21st: The Journal of Contemporary Photography, and The Harvard Review.
John came to Yale and Harvard from an unlikely and circuitous route. Born in Lincoln, Nebraska, he was raised in towns and cities in Iowa, Nebraska, and North Dakota and educated in public schools. After receiving a B.S.E. in Mechanical Engineering from Duke University and working briefly in finance, he received a Master of Arts in Liberal Science degree in Humanities from Wesleyan University and an M.A. degree in American Studies from Purdue University before pursuing his Ph.D. in American Studies at Yale. He began teaching at Harvard in 1999 and was tenured in 2004.
He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with his wife Deborah Cunningham and their two-year-old son, Erik Isaiah Stauffer.
