About

I am an educator, historian, and critic. I possess a doctorate in U.S. history from Loyola University Chicago, with specialties in cultural and intellectual history, as well as the history of education. That work resulted in a book, The Dream of a Democratic Culture: Mortimer J. Adler and the Great Books Idea (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). I co-founded both the U.S. Intellectual History Blog and the Society for U.S. Intellectual History. Articles by me have appeared in the Journal of the History of Ideas, American Catholic Studies, The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, U.S. Catholic Historian, Public Seminar, and various encyclopedias. I am currently working on two book manuscripts—one on ‘great books cosmopolitanism’ and another on anti-intellectualism and ignorance in post-WWII America. On top of history and education, I also enjoy talking beer, Catholicism, politics, popular culture, and baseball. When I’m in an analytical mode, I tend, of course, toward historical thinking and qualitative (non-analytic) philosophy.