Gary Gerstle is the Paul Mellon Professor of American History and Fellow of Sidney Sussex College at the University of Cambridge.

He arrived in Cambridge in 2014 after a three-decade career in the United States. He is a historian of twentieth-century America, 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 lives in Cambridge, England, and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

American political thought, institutions, and conflicts

In recent years, Gerstle has focused his writing on the history of American political thought, institutions, and conflicts. Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present (Princeton, 2015), identifies the contradictory principles of governance that became part of the Constitution and that have shaped and confounded the deployment of public power ever since.  The book won the 2016 OAH Ellis W. Hawley Prize for outstanding work in American political history. It was also a 2016 Editors’ Choice of New York Times Book Review.

In recent years, Gerstle has published three co-edited works: Beyond the New Deal Order (Pennsylvania, 2019) ; States of Exception in American History (Chicago, 2020); and A Cultural History of Democracy during the Modern Age (Bloomsbury, 2021). Gerstle is currently writing The Rise and Fall of America’s Neoliberal Order, 1970-2020, to be published by Oxford in 2022.

Gerstle’s other works in the field of political history include Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914-1960 (Princeton, 1989) and two books co-edited with Steve Fraser: The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980 (Princeton, 1989) and Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy (Harvard, 2005). A book series, Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America, that Gerstle co-edits for Princeton, has published more than forty books, many of them prizewinners.

Immigration, race, and nationality

Throughout his career, Gerstle has also written extensively about immigration, race, and nationality, with a particular focus on how Americans have constituted (and reconstituted) themselves as a nation and the ways in which immigration and race have disrupted and reinforced that process. His most important publication in this area is American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 2001), winner of the Saloutos Prize for outstanding work in immigration and ethnic history. In 2008, Maureen Costigan, book critic of NPR’s Fresh Air, chose American Crucible as one of the “Best Books for a Transformative New Year.” In 2017, Princeton published an expanded edition of American Crucible with a new chapter exploring race and nation in the age of Obama and Trump.

Fellowships, Lectures, Honors

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, as Visiting Professor at the Ecoles des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, and as the Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at the University of Oxford. He has lectured throughout North America and Europe, and in Brazil, Israel, Japan, Mexico, South Africa, and South Korea. His writings have been translated into Arabic, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Gerstle is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Historical Society. He was elected to the Society of American Historians in 2006, and named a Distinguished Lecturer of the Organization of American Historians in 2007.

Media

Gerstle is the creator and presenter of a four-part radio series, “America: Laboratory of Democracy,” aired on BBC World Service in October-November 2017 and on multiple NPR stations in the US in early 2018. He has testified before the US Congress on immigration matters. 

Gerstle is often consulted by newspaper reporters, magazine writers, and radio and television producers on matters pertinent to his areas of historical expertise. He is a regular guest on David Runciman’s popular UK podcast, Talking Politics.