Gary Gerstle

Gary Gerstle is the Paul Mellon Professor of American History Emeritus and Paul Mellon Director of Research in American History at the University of Cambridge. A historian of modern America, he has written extensively on the intersection of economics and politics and on the tangled relationship between race and nationality. His most recent book, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era (Oxford University Press, 2022), was shortlisted for the 2022 Financial Times Business Book of the Year and made several best books lists.

Gerstle’s current work explores the circumstances that have made authoritarianism so tempting and democracy so fragile in contemporary America. It looks backward to moments in American history when democracy revived, and it examines the factors—economic, technological, cultural—that mark the current moment as both similar to and different from the past.

Gerstle received his BA from Brown University and his PhD from Harvard University. His books include two prize winners, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton University Press, 2001) and Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present (Princeton University Press, 2015). Gerstle has written for the Atlantic, Dissent, the Guardian, the Nation, the New Statesman, and the New York Review of Books. He frequently appears on BBC Radio 4, BBC World Service, NPR, and podcasts. He is a fellow of the British Academy and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.