Department of History

Robert Self is Mary Ann Lippitt Professor of American History and Department Chair. A historian of modern American history, Self is the author of All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy since the 1960s (Hill and Wang 2012), a history of a half-century of gender and sexual politics in the United States, and American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, 2003), an award-winning study of metropolitan politics featuring the simultaneous rise of the tax revolt and black power in California in the decades after World War II.

He is also co-editor, with Margot Canaday and Nancy Cott, of Intimate States: Gender, Sexuality, and Governance in Modern U.S. History, (University of Chicago, 2021) about the modern history of the American state's power in, and over, people's intimate lives. A former Guggenheim and Burkhardt Fellow, Self is now at work on a book entitled "Driven: The Rise and Fall of the Hydrocarbon Middle Class," about houses, cars, and children in the making of the modern middle-class family and the modern energy regime. Additionally, with James Henretta, Eric Hinderaker, and Rebecca Edwards, he is the author of America’s History, a comprehensive college and AP High School U.S. history textbook.