Professor Jonathan Bell appointed as incoming Rhodes Professor of American History.

The Faculty of History is delighted to announce that Professor Jonathan Bell  has been appointed as the incoming Rhodes Professor of American History. 

Jonathan Bell is a historian of US politics, public policy, and social movements. He is especially interested in the relationship between social and health policy and marginalized communities. He is the author of The Liberal State on Trial: The Cold War and American Politics in the Truman Years (Columbia University Press, 2004), California Crucible: The Forging of Modern American Liberalism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), and his forthcoming book The Health Care Closet: Sexual Politics and American Health since the Rights Revolutions (University of Pennsylvania Press, in press), which examines how a privatised, insurance-based health care system in the United States interacted with a limited and parsimonious welfare state to shape the ways in which sexual minorities became political subjects between the 1960s and the present. He is the editor of Making Sence of American Liberalism (with Tim Stanley), and Beyond the Politics of the Closet: Gay Rights and the American State since the 1970s (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020). Prior to taking up the Rhodes Chair at Oxford, Professor Bell spent twelve years at UCL, including eight years as Head of Department of the Institute of the Americas. 

" I am honoured and excited to take up the Rhodes Professorship and to join such an academic powerhouse in the Faculty of History at Oxford. The vibrant community at the Rothermere American Institute, the recent appointment of two leading scholars in the history of gender and sexuality, Sarah Knott and Matt Cook, and the intellectual excitement of the wider Faculty at Oxford all open up enormous opportunities for my research and teaching agendas. I look forward to renewing existing friendships and to forging new professional collaborations in my new academic home.” said Professor Bell. 

The Chair of the History Faculty Board, Professor Martin Conway said “The History Faculty is delighted that Jonathan Bell will be joining us at the end of the summer. Jonathan is a distinguished scholar of the social and political history of the USA in the twentieth century, and will be a very active presence in our teaching and research culture”. 

Professor Bell will take up their post in October 2026.