About Tom
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Thomas Bender is University Professor of the Humanities, and a Professor of History at New York University. A native of northern California, Tom received his B.A. at the University of Santa Clara in 1966, and his M.A. (1967) and Ph.D. (1971) from the University of California, Davis. He arrived at New York University in 1974. In the course of his career at NYU Tom has left his distinct mark on everything, from historiographical debates to the teaching of history on the undergraduate and graduate levels as well as primary and secondary schools. He has mentored over fifty doctoral dissertations, and served as an informal advisor to countless other NYU students. At NYU Tom served as NYU’s Dean of Humanities (twice) and Chair of NYU’s History Department (twice), as well as the co-director of the New York Institute for the Humanities.
Tom has held a variety of other positions within the larger historical profession. He has served on advisory boards of everything from the Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History to the executive board of the OAH. He has labored on the editorial boards of the Journal of American History, the American Historical Review, and several other peer-reviewed journals in history and in allied disciplines. During his career Tom has worked hard to shore up support for history and the other humanities through his work with the New York Public Library, the New York Historical Society and as Chair of the New York Council for the Humanities. As secretary of the committee on graduate education for the AHA, Tom helped oversee the report that he co-authored with Colin Palmer and Philip Katz, The Education of Historians in the 21st Century (2004). He has since contributed multiple articles on the challenges facing the profession, as well as practical reforms to both the undergraduate and graduate curriculum. Tom is, in short, the consummate academic professional among his generation of scholars. Tom’s intellectual contributions to the profession are profound. His first book, Toward an Urban Vision (1975), won the OAH’s Frederick Jackson Turner Prize. That early work helped reinvigorate the fields of both urban history and intellectual and cultural history. Subsequent works proved equally influential: Community and Social Change in America (1982) offered a sustained and subtle critique of the use of modernization theory within the historical profession. Subsequent works blended his twinned interests in the intellectual history of the city with larger theoretical concerns, yielding works as eclectic and as provocative as New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City, from 1750 to the Beginnings of Our Own Time (1988), Intellect and Public Life: Essays on the Social History of Academic Intellectuals in the United States (1993), and The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Area (2002). Tom’s intellectual reach has extended far beyond his books. In several essays written in the 1980s and 1990s, Tom helped foster enormously important debates within the field of American history. His famous essay “Wholes and Parts: The Need for Synthesis in American History,” published in the Journal of American History in 1986, sparked an immensely fruitful discussion over how best to integrate the vast scholarship in social history accumulated over the previous two decades. At the same time, Tom brokered another important – and equally productive – debate over the relationship between capitalism and abolition that first appeared in the pages of the American Historical Review and was later published as an edited volume, The Anti-Slavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation (1992). Since the early 2000s Tom’s work has increasingly focused on transnational connections and the global framing of the history of North America, beginning with earliest European ventures out onto the Atlantic to the present. In 2006, he published A Nation Among Nations: America’s Place in World History, a remarkable model of scholarship that embodied Tom’s belief that the nation state, while remaining a relevant analytical framework, can only be fully understood in the context of global forces that necessarily transcend the boundaries of the United States. It has since become one of the cardinal works of the “transnational turn,” one that Tom has elaborated in numerous essays in journals, edited volumes, and professional newsletters in the United States and abroad. Tom has been named a Guggenheim Fellow, Rockefeller Humanities Fellow, Getty Scholar, Mel and Lois Tukman Fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and Bogliasco Foundation Fellow. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1994. Tom believes that historians can and should at times contribute directly to public life as historians, and over the years he has written for various magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times, The Nation, Los Angeles Times, Chronicle of Higher Education, Newsday, Skyline, and Democracy. Tom’s scholarship and interviews have been published in a half dozen languages. He is currently writing a history of the United States for a general audience. |
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Department of History, Faculty of Arts and Science,
King Juan Carlos I Spain Center, 53 Washington Square South, 402, New York, NY 10012
Phone: (212) 998-8633 Email: [email protected]
King Juan Carlos I Spain Center, 53 Washington Square South, 402, New York, NY 10012
Phone: (212) 998-8633 Email: [email protected]