Dan Rogers

Dan Rodgers, the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University, is an historian of ideas and culture whose work has ranged widely across four centuries of American history. He is the author of five prize-winning books, including Atlantic Crossings (1998), a pioneering work in the new transnational history of the United States, and the Bancroft Prize winning Age of Fracture (2011), a history of social ideas and arguments in the last quarter of the 20th century which not only helped put the word fracture on the map as a description of the last forty years of American history but showed how the very idea of “society” began to fall apart after the 1970s. His articles have run the gamut from American exceptionalism, the career of “republicanism,” and the social history of ideas in motion, to essays in contemporary politics. 

He is the recipient of teaching awards from both the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Princeton University. He has been twice been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, as well a Fulbright lecturer in Germany and Japan and the Pitt Professor of American History at Cambridge University. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 

He lives in Princeton with his wife, Irene, a former speech therapist with the Mercer County Special Services School District and currently active as an ESL tutor with refugee families. He served as chair of the board of Mercer Street Friends, a major Trenton-based social service agency. He is an active amateur musician and cellist. 

His scholarly interest while at Stanford will focus on the post-World War II era anxieties over the fragilities of democracy.