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John Kasson, Joint Full Professor of American Studies and History
Contact Information
Greenlaw Hall, CB #3520
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3520
jfkasson@email.unc.edu
Education
Ph.D., Yale University, 1971
A.B., Harvard University, 1966
Background / Research Interests
John Kasson is a cultural historian, a field that encompasses a rich variety of materials, both “high” and “low,” as well as disciplines ranging from literature and the visual arts to psychology and anthropology. He teaches a number of courses in history for undergraduates and graduate students, including a seminar, “Bodies on Display: Perspectives on the Body in American Culture,” a lecture course on the popular arts and American culture (HIST 579) and a seminar on technology and American culture (HIST 625). He also regularly teaches undergraduate courses In the Department of American Studies, in which he holds a joint appointment.
Professor Kasson’s research has been persistently concerned with the rich variety of American cultural expression in a dynamic society. Several books have emerged from this work: Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America, 1776-1900 (1976); Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (1978); Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (1990); and Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in American Culture (2001). All of these books are available from Hill & Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
Professor Kasson's current scholarly project continues the investigations of the origins of modern commercial culture and its attendant new structures of feeling. With the working title, The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression: Shirley Temple and 1930s America, he plans to write a book on the place of children in the changing financial and emotional economies during a pivotal decade.
Professor Kasson has taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill since 1971. He has been the recipient of a number of honors and awards, including a Bowman and Gordon Gray Professorship for inspirational undergraduate teaching, election to the Society of American historians, and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the Humanities Institute at the University of California at Davis, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Graduate Students Advised by John Kasson:
Courses Offered (As Schedules Allow)
For current course listings, consult the Directory of Classes
- HIST 179H -- Childhood in America
- HIST 395 -- Bodies on Display: Perspectives on the Body in American Culture
- HIST 579 -- Popular Culture and American History
- HIST 625 -- Technology and American Culture
- HIST 875 -- Topics in American Cultural History