Professor Jonathan Bell

I am Rhodes Professor of American History in the Faculty of History and Professorial Fellow at St Catherine’s. Prior to taking up my post at Oxford in 2026, I spent twelve years as a professor at UCL, including eight years as Head of Department of the Institute of the Americas. I hold degrees from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge and have also taught at Cambridge and the University of Reading. I serve on the editorial boards of the journals Modern American History and the Journal of American Studies and am past Chair of the Historians of the Twentieth Century United States (HOTCUS).

I am a historian of US politics, with a particular emphasis on American liberalism and social movements since the New Deal and the ways in which liberal politics have adapted to social change during the twentieth century. I have published widely in US political history, including a book on how the Cold War transformed American political discourse and policy formation on domestic issues during the Truman Presidency, a collection of essays on American liberalism, an edited collection on LGBTQ politics, and a book charting the changing political complexion of California since World War Two. I have published in the top journals in my field, including the Journal of American History, the Journal of Policy History, the Journal of American Studies, and Modern American History. My research has been funded by the British Academy, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the Leverhulme Trust.

My recently completed book, entitled The Health Care Closet: Sexual Politics and American Health since the Rights Revolutions, funded by a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship, aims to unite the two phenomena of rights politics and health care delivery/welfare politics to help us understand the sexual and gender dynamics of medical care in the US since the 1960s. The books sheds significant light on the political culture of the nation at a time of significant political change in the era of government and health care retrenchment that began in the seventies and grew considerably in the Reagan era. The project shows that both state and private conceptions of gender and sexuality impacted upon their ability to provide health care to a diverse population, and demonstrates how a private-public delivery system drastically impacted upon the ability of rights movements to translate basic legal rights into full-blown economic citizenship, a question of vital public importance today across the globe. It offers a new interpretation of the private-public welfare state, the centrality of health care access to the devolution of the New Deal order and the Fordist political economy, and the place of the AIDS epidemic in this process. The book contributes to the history of HIV/AIDS, LGBTQ+ History, history of medicine and public health, political history, history of gender and sexuality, and history of the welfare state.  It will be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in Autumn 2027. 

I am excited to embark on a new research project on the relationship between precarity, vulnerability, and the evolution of sexual identity in the United States since the emergence of modern sexology. I teach widely on modern US history and the history of sexuality and gender and contribute to the teaching and research programme of the Oxford Centre for Women’s, Gender, and Queer Histories and the Rothermere American Institute. I would be delighted to hear from prospective doctoral students interested in working on areas related to my research agenda.