John Stauffer

John Stauffer is the Chair of the History of American Civilization and Professor of English and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Among the leading scholars of the Civil War era, antislavery, social protest movements, and visual culture, he is the author or editor of seven books and more than 45 articles, including The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (2002), which won four major awards, including the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, the Avery Craven Book Award, and the Lincoln Prize runner-up; and The Problem of Evil (with Steven Mintz, 2006). His essays have appeared in Time Magazine, Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times Book Review, Raritan, New York Post, 21st: The Journal of Contemporary Photography, and The Harvard Review, as well as scholarly journals. John has appeared on national radio and television shows, and currently is completing a book with Sally Jenkins on radical interracialism and Unionism in Civil War era Mississippi. The story, Free State of Jones, will appear as a major motion picture by the filmmaker Gary Ross, with whom John served as a scholarly consultant. John received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1999, began teaching at Harvard that year, and was tenured in 2004. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife, Deborah Cunningham, and their two-year-old son, Erik Isaiah Stauffer.