Office Hours: Mondays 12-1:30, 3-4:30pm or by appointment (for History 74N)

Lisa McGirr specializes in the history of the 20th century United States. Her research and teaching interests bridge the fields of social and political history and focus, in particular, on collective action, state building, reform movements, and politics. She has researched on the American penal state, transnational social movements, and the intersection of religion and politics in the twentieth-century United States. Her most recent book the War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State (W.W. Norton, 2016) has won wide acclaim for excavating the significant but neglected state-building legacies of national Prohibition. Her award winning first book, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right investigates the social and regional basis of grass-roots conservative politics in the post-World War II United States. She teaches a wide variety of courses on the history of the United States in the 20th century.

Selected Publications

• The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State (W.W. Norton, 2016)
• American History Now (Temple University Press, 2011) (edited with Eric Foner)
• “The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti: A Global History” Journal of American History 93 (March 2007) 1085-111
• Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton University Press 2001, 2015)

*Photo by Tony Rinaldo - from the Radcliffe Institute Website