John Stauffer (professor)
John Stauffer is Professor of English, American Studies, and African American Studies at Harvard University. He writes and lectures on the Civil War era, antislavery, social protest movements, and photography.
Education and career
Stauffer received his Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University in 1999, began teaching at Harvard University that year, and was tenured in 2004. He was the Chair of History and Literature and Professor of English and African and African American Studies in 2013, Chair of the History of American Civilization and Professor of English and African and African American Studies from 2006-2012, and Professor of English, History of American Civilization, and African and African American Studies from 2004-2006.He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with his wife, Deborah Cunningham, and their two children, Erik and Nicholas.
He is the author and editor of eleven books, including two books that were briefly national bestsellers: GIANTS: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, which won the Iowa Author Award and a Boston Authors Club Award and has been translated into Mandarin, Arabic, and Korean; and State of Jones, co-authored with Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins.
His first book, The Black Hearts of Men, won the Frederick Douglass Prize and Avery Craven Book Prize, and was the Lincoln Prize runner-up.
His most recent books are The Battle Hymn of the Republic: A Biography of the Song that Marches On, co-authored with Benjamin Soskis, which was a Lincoln Prize finalist and a Best Book of 2013 from Civil War Memory and Moore to the Point; and Sally Mann, Southern Landscape.
Stauffer's essays and reviews have appeared in Time, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, The New Republic, Raritan, and numerous scholarly journals and books. He has lectured in Europe and Asia for the State Department's International Information Programs.
In 2009, Harvard University named him the Walter Channing Cabot Fellow for "achievements and scholarly eminence in the fields of literature, history, or art."
Stauffer appeared in the PBS documentary The Abolitionists and was an advisor for the film. He was also a consultant for the PBS documentaries The African American Express: Many Rivers to Cross and God in America.
He was also a consultant to the 2012-2014 exhibition WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY and contributed an essay to the exhibition catalogue.
Awards
- 2013: Lincoln Prize finalist for The Battle Hymn of the Republic
- 2013: Best Books of 2013 for The Battle Hymn of the Republic: Civil War Memory and Moore to the Point
- 2010: Bancroft Prize Juror, Columbia University
- 2009-10: Walter Channing Cabot Fellow, Harvard University, for “achievements and scholarly eminence in the fields of literature, history or art.”
- 2009: Purdue University, College of Liberal Arts, Distinguished Alumni Award
- 2009: Iowa Author Award
- 2009: Boston Authors Club Award: “Highly Recommended”
- 2008: Association of American University Presses “must have” selection for Public and Secondary School Libraries
- 2007: Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize Nomination
- 2005: Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award
- 2005: Nineteenth-Century Studies Association, runner-up for the best essay.
- 2003: Avery O. Craven Award for the most original book on the coming of the Civil War, the Civil War, or the era of Reconstruction, from the Organization of American Historians
- 2003: Lincoln Prize, Second Place Winner, for the best book on Lincoln or theCivil War era, from the Gettysburg Institute
- 2003: Magill’s Literary Annual award, for The Black Hearts of Men
- 2002: Frederick Douglass Book Prize, Co-Winner, for the best book on slavery, resistance, or abolition, from the Gilder Lehrman Institute
- 2002: Jan Thaddeus Teaching Prize, History and Literature, Harvard University
- 2000: Dixon Ryan Fox Prize finalist, for the best book-length manuscript on New York State, New York State Historical Association, 2000
- 1999: Ralph Henry Gabriel Prize recipient for the best dissertation in American Studies, American Studies Association
- 1997-98: Teaching Prize Fellowship Nomination, Yale University
Publications
Books
- Southern Landscape, photographs by Sally Mann, “Introduction and Reflections” by John Stauffer
- The Battle Hymn of the Republic: A Biography of the Song That Marches On, co-authored with Benjamin Soskis.
Best Books of 2013, Civil War Memory: “Best Union Study”
Best Books of 2013, Moore to the Point
Best Books of 2013, Civil War Monitor
- The Abolitionist Imagination, by Andrew Delbanco with commentaries by John Stauffer, Manisha Sinha, Darryl Pinckney, and Wilfred M. McClay
- The State of Jones, co-authored with Sally Jenkins.
Over 30,000 hardcover copies sold
Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize by Doubleday.
- GIANTS: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. Published November 3, 2008.
Boston Authors Club 2009 award: “highly recommended.”
Progressive Book Club featured selection.
History Book Club featured selection.
Boston Globe bestseller
Amazon.com bestseller
Reviewed in over 100 newspapers and magazines
Over 30,000 hardcover copies sold
Korean, Mandarin, and Arabic translations
- The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race.
Winner of the Avery Craven Book Award.
Lincoln Prize 2nd Place Winner.
Magill’s Literary Annual award for “best serious literature” in 2002.
Full-page review in The New York Times Book Review.
Essays
- “Book Review: ‘The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation’ by David Brion Davis,” The Wall Street Journal, Bookshelf, January 31, 2014:
- “Book Review: ‘Another America’ by James Ciment,” The Wall Street Journal, December 20, 2013: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324094704579068902901092472
- “Author Interview with John Stauffer and Benjamin Soskis,” Religion in American History, August 28, 2013: http://usreligion.blogspot.com/2013/08/author-interview-with-john-stauffer-and.html
- “How the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’ Became America’s Hymn,” The Christian Century: Then and Now, July 31, 2013: http://www.christiancentury.org/blogs/archive/2013-07/how-battle-hymn-republic-became-americas-hymn
- “Were Hawthorne’s Politics “Disgraceful’? The New York Review of Books 60:12 : ??-??: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/jul/11/were-hawthornes-politics-disgraceful/?insrc=toc
- “Hooker’s Defeat,” Washington Post, Style Section, April 29, 2013: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/overlooked-stories-of-the-civil-war/2013/04/26/468ea07c-a61f-11e2-a8e2-5b98cb59187f_story.html
- “What Every American Should Know About Frederick Douglass, Abolitionist Prophet,” Huffington Post, January 8, 2013: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-stauffer/frederick-douglass-the-prophet_b_2425712.html
- “The Anniversary of the Gettysburg Address,” Religion & Politics, November 19, 2012: http://religionandpolitics.org/2012/11/19/the-anniversary-of-the-gettysburg-address/
- “Outlaws Together,” The Wall Street Journal, February 24, 2012 : https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970204795304577223214148303948
- “Civility, Civil Society, and Civil Wars,” Civility and American Democracy: A National Forum, sponsored by the NEH, February 2012: http://www.search-document.com/pdf/6/1/john-stauffer.html#.
- “John Brown Marches On,” co-authored with Benjamin Soskis, The New York Times Opinionator, July 17, 2011, online at: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/17/john-brown-marches-on/
- “Briefly Out of Bondage,” The Wall Street Journal, January 6, 2011 : http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052748704723104576062313605828064-lMyQjAxMTAxMDIwOTEyNDkyWj.html
- “Fear and Doubt in Cleveland,” The New York Times, December 22, 2010, The Opinion Pages, Opinionator: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/22/fear-and-doubt-in-cleveland/
- “The Great Northern Migration,” The Wall Street Journal, September 4–5, 2010, W8: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703467004575463852823978496
- “In a Fury Over Freedom,” The Wall Street Journal, March 26, 2010, W6 : https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703580904575132661270314770
- “A Pragmatic Precedent”, The New York Times, January 19, 2009.
- “What Obama Can Learn from Lincoln’s Inaugural,” The Huffington Post, January 11, 2009.
- Letter to the Editor, on Frederick Douglass and Ralph Waldo Emerson, New York Times Book Review, September 21, 2008, p. 6.
- “Across the Great Divide: The Friendship Between Lincoln and Frederick Douglass required from both a change of heart,” Time Magazine, Special Issue, July 4, 2005, pp. 58–65.
- “12 Years Between Life and Death,” American Literary History, Special Forum on 12 Years a Slave, 26:2 : advanced access at: http://alh.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/recent
- “Fear and Doubt in Cleveland,” The New York Times Disunion: 106 Articles From The New York Times Opinionator, ed. Ted Widmer, pp. 22–26.
- “The ‘Terrible Reality’ of the First Living-Room Wars,” WAR/PHOTOGRAPHY: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath, by Anne Wilkes Tucker and Will Michels, pp. 80–93.
- *Venues include Museum of Fine Arts, Houston ; the Annenberg Space for Photography, Los Angeles ; The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. ; and the Brooklyn Museum, New York.
Upcoming publications
- Frederick Douglass, The Heroic Slave: A Cultural and Critical Edition, co-edited with Robert S. Levine.
- Picturing Frederick Douglass: The Most Photographed American of the Nineteenth Century, co-edited with Zoe Trodd and Marie-Celeste Bernier.
- Charles Sumner: A Cultural Biography, co-authored with Sally Jenkins..