Jerald Podair, associate professor of history, was appointed the Robert S. French Professor of American Studies in May and is organizing an undergraduate program in American studies, beginning with an introductory course.
A specialist in 20th-century United States history, his research interests include urban history and ethnic and racial relations. His current book projects are a study of the civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, a biography of baseball mogul Walter O’Malley, and a primary-source anthology in United States history after 1877 titled The American Conversation, written in collaboration with Professor James H. Merrell, ’75, of Vassar College.
Professor Podair’s doctoral thesis at Princeton University, “Like Strangers: Blacks, Whites, and New York City’s Ocean Hill-Brownsville Crisis,” was awarded the 1998 Allan Nevins Prize by the Society of American Historians as the best-written dissertation in American history to appear that year. It was published as a book under the title The Strike That Changed New York by Yale University Press in 2002 and was a finalist for the Organization of American Historians’ Liberty Legacy Foundation Award and honorable mention for the Urban History Association’s Book Award.
In addition to teaching courses in 19th and 20th-century American history and upper-level courses on the Civil War; the 1920s, Great Depression, and New Deal; the 1960s; and American race relations, he also teaches, with Paul Cohen, professor of history and the Patricia Hamar Boldt Professor of Liberal Studies, the history department’s capstone course, The Practice of History, in which he supervises senior history majors on research projects that often result in papers presented at the annual Richard A. Harrison Symposium for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
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