Matthew Jacobson

Matthew Frye Jacobson, Ph.D., Brown University, 1992, is professor of African American Studies, History, and American Studies. He is the author of What Have they Built You to Do?: The Manchurian Candidate and Cold War America, (with Gaspar Gonzalez, 2006), Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post–Civil Rights America (2005), Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (2000), Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (1998), and Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States (1995). He is currently at work on Odetta’s Voice and Other Weapons: The Civil Rights Era as Cultural History.

His teaching interests are clustered under the general category of race in U.S. political culture 1790–present, including U.S. imperialism, immigration and migration, popular culture, and the juridical structures of U.S. citizenship.