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. He 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 in Britain, Europe, and the US. He has written about the rise and fall of social democracy in Europe and America; eighteenth-century American politics and ideas; the career of the American philosophy of pragmatism from the late nineteenth to the twenty-first century; interpretations of American culture offered by European observers from Tocqueville through Weber; and the relation between contemporary critical theory and historical writing. 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. 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. Current research projects include the theory and practice of democracy in Europe and America from Pericles to Lincoln; American political thought from Roger Williams to Barack Obama; the role of the philosophy of pragmatism in American culture; and a collection of essays on the practice of pragmatic hermeneutics in historical writing. He will next be on sabbatical leave in 2012-2013.

Selected Publications

• The Virtues of Liberalism (Oxford University Press, 1998)
• A Companion to American Thought (Blackwell, 1995) a volume co-edited with Richard Wightman Fox.
• Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Professivism in European and American Thought, 1870-1920 (Oxford University Press, 1986)

Contact Info

Robinson Hall

Room 120

35 Quincy Street

Cambridge, MA 02138

jkloppen@fas.harvard.edu

617.496.0197

Office Hours: Thursday 3:00-6:00
& by appt.

Course(s): 84l, 1330, 2340, FS48n

Curriculum Vitae