James T. Kloppenberg was born in Denver and educated at Dartmouth (A.B. 1973) and Stanford (M.A., 1976, Ph.D., 1980). He enjoys playing tennis, swimming, hiking, and following the Red Sox, the Celtics, and soccer everywhere. He and his wife Mary have lived in Wellesley, MA, since 1980. In recognition of his teaching, he has been named a Harvard College Professor and awarded the Levinson Memorial Teaching Prize by the Harvard Undergraduate Council. He teaches courses on European and American thought, culture, and politics from the ancient world to the present. He serves on the faculty of the graduate program in the History of American Civilization and the undergraduate concentrations in History and Literature and Social Studies.

Kloppenberg has held fellowships from the Danforth, Whiting, and Guggenheim foundations, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has held the Pitt professorship at the University of Cambridge, has taught at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and has lectured throughout Britain, Europe, and the United States. He has written about the rise and fall of social democracy in Europe and America; American politics and ideas from the seventeenth century to the present; the American philosophy of pragmatism; European observers of America from Tocqueville through Weber; and the relation between contemporary critical theory and historical writing. Current research projects include “The Intellectual Origins of Democracy in Europe and America” (to be published by Oxford University Press); “The American Democratic Tradition: Roger Williams to Barack Obama” (to be published by Princeton University Press); varieties of philosophical pragmatism in American culture from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century; and an essay collection on the practice of pragmatic hermeneutics in historical writing. He will next be on sabbatical leave in 2012-2013.

Selected Publications

Books

• Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought,
  1870-1920 (Oxford University Press, 1986), awarded the 1987 Merle Curti Prize by the
  Organization of American Historians.
• A Companion to American Thought (Blackwell, 1995) a volume co-edited with Richard
  Wightman Fox.
• The Virtues of Liberalism (Oxford University Press, 1998).
• Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition (Princeton University
  Press, 2010).

Journal Articles

• "Pragmatism: An Old Name for Some New Ways of Thinking?" Journal of American History 83 (1996).
• "Pragmatism and the Practice of History," Metaphilosophy 35 (2004).
• "The Canvas and the Color: Tocqueville's 'Philosophical History' and Why it Matters Now," Modern Intellectual History 3 (2006).
• "Tocqueville, Mill, and the American Gentry," La Revue Tocqueville/The Tocqueville Review 27, 2 (2006). Another version of this article was published in Richeche di Storia Politica 8 (Ottobre 2005).

Book Chapters

• "Intellectual History, Democracy, and the Culture of Irony," in Melvyn Stokes, ed., The State of American History (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2002).
• "The Place of Value in a Culture of Facts: Truth and Historicism," in David A. Hollinger, ed., The Humanities and the Dynamics of Inclusion since World War II (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).
• "James's Pragmatism and American Culture, 1907-2007," in John Stuhr, ed., 100 Years of Pragmatism: William James's Revolutionary Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010).
• "Requiescat in Pacem: The Liberal Tradition of Louis Hartz," in Mark Hulliung, ed., The American Liberal Tradition Reconsidered: The Contested Legacy of Louis Hartz (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010).

Review Essays

• "Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Visionary," Reviews in American History 34 (2006).

Encyclopedia Articles

• "Liberalism," The Princeton Encyclopedia of United States Political History, ed. Michael Kazin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).

Contact Info

Robinson Hall

Room 202

35 Quincy Street

Cambridge, MA 02138

jkloppen@fas.harvard.edu

617.496.0197

Office Hours: appointments may be scheduled through Elena Palladino epalladino@fas.harvard.edu
617.496.4067

Curriculum Vitae