Department of History

Christopher Grasso is a historian of American culture, religion, and politics.  His research and writing have focused on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  He is the author of A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut (1999) and Skepticism and American Faith: From the Revolution to the Civil War (2018), which won the SHEAR Best Book Prize.  He has received year-long grants from the NEH, ACLS, and National Humanities Center, and has published essays in journals including the William & Mary Quarterly, the Journal of the Early Republic, and the Journal of American History.  Grasso’s latest book is Teacher, Preacher, Soldier, Spy: The Civil Wars of John R. Kelso (Oxford University Press, 2021); he also edited part of Kelso’s Civil War memoir for Yale University Press as Bloody Engagements: John R. Kelso’s Civil War (2017). Before coming to Brown in 2022, he was the Pullen Professor of History at William & Mary. He earned his PhD from Yale in 1992, and also taught at St. Olaf College. He was Editor of the William & Mary Quarterly from 2000-2013.