Harmsworth Visiting Professors of American History appointed for 2024–27

The University of Oxford has announced the appointment of Harmsworth Professors of American History for the three academic years from Michaelmas term 2024. The Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professorship of American History is affiliated with Queen's College and the RAI, and remembers the eldest son of the 1st Viscount Rothermere, who died in the First World War. Since its establishment in 1922, the Chair has been held by many of America's most distinguished historians. The current Harmsworth Professor for is Elizabeth R. Varon (Virginia).
 

Professor Lisa McGirr (2024–25)

Lisa McGirr is the Charles Warren Professor of American History at Harvard University and the Director of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History. Her research interests bridge the fields of social and political history and focus especially on collective action, state building, and conservative movements. She is the author of the War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State (W.W. Norton, 2016) and Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton University Press, 2001; 2015). She is the co-author (with Eric Foner and Kathleen DuVal) of the college textbook, Give Me Liberty! An American History, which is currently in its seventh edition (2021). She has published numerous articles and essays on transnational social movements, the American penal state, and the US right. Her work has appeared in the Journal of American History, the New York Times, and the BBC History Magazine.

She is currently at work on a book on the history of twentieth-century United States populist rightwing mobilizations and the origins of Trumpism within the Republican Party. In addition, McGirr is working on a project on indigenous expropriation and western libertarianism at the turn of the twentieth century.

Professor Eliga Gould (2025–26)

Eliga Gould is Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire. His scholarship focuses on the American Revolution, with an emphasis on the entangled history that Americans shared with the rest of the Americas, as well as with Africa, Europe, and the wider world.  His current book project, Crucible of Peace (under contract with OUP), examines the least studied of the United States’ founding documents: the Treaty of Paris, which ended the American Revolutionary War in 1783. In Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (Harvard UP, 2012), he explored the early American republic’s quest to be accepted as a ‘treaty worthy’ nation by Europe’s colonial powers and how that quest shaped American thinking about an array of issues, including federalism, Native American treaty rights, and the abolition of slavery.

His other publications include The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (UNC Press, 2000), Empire and Nation: The American Revolution in the Atlantic World, co-edited with Peter S. Onuf (Johns Hopkins UP, 2005), the first volume of The Cambridge History of America and the World, co-edited with Carla Pestana and Paul Mapp, and numerous journal articles, book chapters, and review essays.

Professor Laurie Maffly-Kipp (2026–27)

Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp is the Archer Alexander Distinguished Professor in Religion and Politics at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St Louis. Her research and teaching focus on African American religions, Mormonism, religion on the Pacific borderlands of the Americas, and issues of intercultural contact. Her publications include Religion and Society in Frontier California (Yale UP, 1994), Setting Down the Sacred Past: African-American Race Histories (Harvard UP, 2010), Practicing Protestants: Histories of Christian Life in America, 1630–1965 with Leigh Schmidt and Mark Valeri (Johns Hopkins UP, 2006), and Proclamation to the People: Nineteenth-Century Mormonism and the Pacific Basin Frontier with Reid Neilson (University of Utah Press, 2008). She has edited several anthologies, and has published articles in Religion and American Culture, The Journal of Mormon History, Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture, and the New Republic.

Her current book project is a history of Mormonism as a global religious movement, as well as an edited collection of essays on Mormon traditions in Asia.