Gary Gerstle arrived in Cambridge in 2014 after a three-decade career in the United States, most recently at Vanderbilt University where he was James G. Stahlman Professor of American History. He is currently Paul Mellon Professor of American History and Fellow of Sidney Sussex College. He is a social and political historian of the twentieth century, with substantial interests in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He received his BA from Brown University and his MA and PhD from Harvard University. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Historical Society.
Gerstle has received many fellowships, including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, a National Endowment of the Humanities Fellowship, and a Membership at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He has served as the Annenberg Visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and as Visiting Professor at the Ecoles des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. In 2012-2013, Oxford elected him to the Vyvyan Harmsworth Professorship in American History. He has lectured throughout North America and Europe, and in Brazil, Israel, Mexico, Japan, South Africa, and South Korea. He was elected to the Society of American Historians in 2006 and named a Distinguished Lecturer of the Organization of American Historians in 2007. He has testified before the US Congress on immigration matters and served as an advisor and on-screen commentator for the 2013 Public Broadcasting Service documentary, Latino Americans. He is the creator and presenter of a four-part radio programme, America: Laboratory of Democracy, broadcast on BBC World Service in October-November 2017, and rebroadcast on multiple National Public Radio stations in the US in early 2018. His writings have been translated into Arabic, Dutch, French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish.
