Professor Bruce J Schulman
Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History
The Queen's College
My teaching and research explore the political and cultural history of the modern United States. During my one-year term as Harmsworth Visiting Professor at Oxford, I will participate in the DPhil workshop, co-teach the Master’s course, supervise Master’s students, and offer lectures in US History.
Over the course of my career my scholarship has focused largely on the relationships between politics and broader social and cultural change. As a student, I encountered a well-developed scholarly literature in political history and much vigorous new work in social and cultural history. But those works rarely spoke to each other; few studies investigated the ways politics and policy affected the experiences of ordinary citizens, or the ways broader cultural forces shaped political structures and policy outcomes. In recent years, however, historians have demonstrated a strong interest in reinvigorating political history, in new ways that avoid the pitfalls of previous scholarship. Blending politics with social and cultural analysis, the approach pays close attention to the ways politics and public policy structure everyday life, defining the boundaries of the cultural arena. At the same time, this scholarship examines the ways social, cultural and demographic forces affected and delimited political action. It has been my privilege to participate in and nurture this exciting new work.
Research Interests
My research focuses on 20th Century US history, particularly on the relationships between politics and broader cultural change. I am the author of three books--From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt; Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism; and, The Seventies--and the editor or co-editor of six others including Rightward Bound, Media Nation, Recapturing the Oval Office, Making the American Century, and Faithful Republic. I am currently completing a volume on the period 1896-1929 for the Oxford History of the United States that investigates the ways the era remade American nationhood through the creation of national markets for goods, audiences for cultural products like film and recorded music, new instruments of government, and different relations with the broader world.
