Upcoming Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professors of American History announced

2024-25  

Lisa McGirr MA MPhil PhD Columbia, Charles Warren Professor of American History at Harvard University, has been appointed for one year from 1 October 2024.  

Lisa McGirr is the Charles Warren Professor of American History at Harvard University and the Director of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History. Her research interests bridge the fields of social and political history and focus especially on collective action, state building, and conservative movements. She is the author of the War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State (W.W. Norton, 2016) and Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton University Press, 2001; 2015). She is the co-author (with Eric Foner and Kathleen DuVal) of a U.S. history college textbook, Give Me Liberty! An American History currently in its seventh edition (2021). She has published numerous articles and essays on transnational social movements, the American penal state, and the U.S. right. Her work has appeared in the Journal of American History, the New York Times, and the BBC History Magazine.  

McGirr is currently at work on a book on the history of twentieth-century United States populist rightwing mobilizations and the origins of Trumpism within the Republican Party. In addition, McGirr is working on a project on indigenous expropriation and western libertarianism at the turn of the twentieth century. 

2025-26  

Eliga Gould AB Princeton MSc Edin MA PhD Johns Hopkins, Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire, has been appointed for one year from 1 October 2025.  

Eliga Gould is Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire.  His scholarship focuses on the American Revolution, with an emphasis on the entangled history that Americans shared with the rest of the Americas, as well as with Africa, Europe, and the wider world.  His current book project, Crucible of Peace (under contract with OUP), examines the least studied of the United States’ founding documents:  the Treaty of Paris that ended the American Revolutionary War in 1783.  In Among the Powers of the Earth:  The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (Harvard UP, 2012), he explored the early American republic’s quest to be accepted as a “treaty worthy” nation by Europe’s colonial powers and how that quest shaped American thinking about an array of issues, including federalism, Native American treaty rights, and the abolition of slavery.  The book has been widely praised, including on the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page and by Noam Chomsky, who highlighted the concept of treaty worthiness in an editorial on contemporary U.S. foreign policy.  Named a Library Journal Best Book of the Year, Among the Powers received the SHEAR Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic and was a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize.  A Japanese translation was published in 2016.  

In addition to being recognized at UNH for excellence in teaching and research, Gould has held long-term fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities (twice), the Charles Warren Center for American Studies at Harvard, the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the Fulbright-Hays Program to the United Kingdom.  His other publications include The Persistence of Empire:  British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (University of North Carolina, 2000), winner of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture’s Jamestown Prize, Empire and Nation:  The American Revolution in the Atlantic World, co-edited with Peter S. Onuf (Johns Hopkins, 2005), the first volume of The Cambridge History of America and the World, co-edited with Carla Pestana and Paul Mapp, and numerous journal articles, book chapters, and review essays.    

Gould has served in leadership roles for the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, the Organization of American Historians, and the Omohundro Institute.  He is co-editor of the University of Virginia Press book series “The Revolutionary Age,” and he is on advisory boards related to the American Revolution’s 250th anniversary for the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, the Old South Meeting House and the Old State House in Boston, and the Library of Congress. 

2026-27  

Laurie Maffly-Kipp BA Amherst MA MPhil PhD Yale, Archer Alexander Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St Louis, has been appointed for one year from 1 October 2026. 

Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp is the Archer Alexander Distinguished Professor in Religion and Politics at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research and teaching focus on African American religions, Mormonism, religion on the Pacific borderlands of the Americas, and issues of intercultural contact. Her publications include Religion and Society in Frontier California (Yale University Press, 1994), Setting Down the Sacred Past: African-American Race Histories (Harvard University Press, 2010), Practicing Protestants: Histories of Christian Life in America, 1630-1965 with Leigh Schmidt and Mark Valeri (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), and Proclamation to the People: Nineteenth-Century Mormonism and the Pacific Basin Frontier with Reid Neilson (University of Utah press, 2008). She has edited several anthologies, and has published articles in Religion and American Culture, The Journal of Mormon History, Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture, and the New Republic.   

Maffly-Kipp’s current book project is a history of Mormonism as a global religious movement, as well as an edited collection of essays on Mormon traditions in Asia.   

Maffly-Kipp earned her B.A. from Amherst College and completed the Ph.D. in American History at Yale University. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships and grants, including a grant for a collaborative project on the History of Christian Practice from the Lilly Endowment, Inc., fellowships at the National Humanities Center, and an NEH Fellowship for University Professors. Her work in African American religion was honored with the James W.C. Pennington Award from the University of Heidelberg in 2014. Maffly-Kipp is a past president of both the American Society of Church History and the Mormon History Association.