User:Ben Alpers

I was graduated in 1986 from Harvard College with an AB summa cum laude in Social Studies (my thesis focused on 18 th - century Russian nationalism). After spending a year studying Modern History at Merton College, Oxford, I returned to the US to work on a presidential campaign. In the fall of 1988, I began pursuing a PhD in American History at Princeton University, from which I received my MA in 1990 and my PhD in 1994. My dissertation has since become a book: Dictators, Democracy, and American Public Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2003). Since 1998, I have been a faculty member at the University of Oklahoma, where I am now Reach for Excellence Associate Professor in the Honors College and Associate Professor of History and of Film and Video Studies. My research and teaching focus on twentieth-century U.S. intellectual and cultural history. I have particular interests in film history and the history of the American right. I am currently working on a history of Leo Strauss and political philosophers in the Straussian tradition in American academic and political life. I have been the recipient of a Mellon Dissertation Fellowship and an American Philosophical Society Sabbatical Fellowship. I have served as co-chair of Historians Against the War, on whose steering committee I still serve. I am currently on the Board of the Oklahoma Humanities Council. During academic year 2007-2008 I will be the Fulbright-Leipzig Chair at the Institute for American Studies at the University of Leipzig, Germany.