Jonathan Bell is Rhodes Professor of American History in the Faculty of History and Professorial Fellow at St Catherine’s College.
Jonathan is a historian of US politics, with a particular emphasis on American liberalism and social movements since the New Deal and the ways in which liberal politics have adapted to social change during the twentieth century. He has published widely in US political history, including a book on how the Cold War transformed American political discourse and policy formation on domestic issues during the Truman Presidency, a collection of essays on American liberalism, an edited collection on LGBTQ politics, and a book charting the changing political complexion of California since World War Two. He has published in the top journals in his field, including the Journal of American History, the Journal of Policy History, the Journal of American Studies, and Modern American History. His research has been funded by the British Academy, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the Leverhulme Trust.
His recently completed book, entitled The Health Care Closet: Sexual Politics and American Health since the Rights Revolutions, funded by a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship, aims to unite the two phenomena of rights politics and health care delivery/welfare politics to help us understand the sexual and gender dynamics of medical care in the US since the 1960s. The books sheds significant light on the political culture of the nation at a time of significant political change in the era of government and health care retrenchment that began in the seventies and grew considerably in the Reagan era. The project shows that both state and private conceptions of gender and sexuality impacted upon their ability to provide health care to a diverse population, and demonstrates how a private-public delivery system drastically impacted upon the ability of rights movements to translate basic legal rights into full-blown economic citizenship, a question of vital public importance today across the globe. It offers a new interpretation of the private-public welfare state, the centrality of health care access to the devolution of the New Deal order and the Fordist political economy, and the place of the AIDS epidemic in this process. The book contributes to the history of HIV/AIDS, LGBTQ+ History, history of medicine and public health, political history, history of gender and sexuality, and history of the welfare state. It will be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in Autumn 2027.
Featured publications:
Book: Beyond the Politics of the Closet: Gay Rights and the American State since the 1970s (University of Pennsylvania Press 2020)
Article: ‘Rethinking the “Straight State”: Welfare Politics, Health Care, and Public Policy in the Shadow of AIDS,’ Journal of American History 104:4 (2018), 931-952.
Chapter: ‘Social Security, Disability Politics, and the Recalibration of Liberalism after the Rights Revolutions,’ in The Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party: New Histories of American Liberalism, 1968-1994 ed. Daniel Geary and Joe Ryna-Hume (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2026).
