Bruce Kuklick

Professor of American History

Bruce Kuklick was born in Philadelphia and attended its public schools. He was educated at the University of Pennsylvania, receiving a BA with a major in philosophy and a PhD in American Civilization. He also spent a year studying at Oxford University and another at the University of London on a Penfield Traveling Fellowship in Diplomacy. He taught at Yale from l968 to l972 and then at the University of Pennsylvania where he is now Professor of History. He instructed at the Open University in London in 1968; in l992 he visited the Netherlands as the Walt Whitman Professor of American Studies, and in 1996 was Guest Professor in Leuven, Belgium; in 2005 as an Exchange Professor at University College, London; and in 1908 he held the Fulbright Distinquished Research Chair at the Roosevelt Studies Center in the Netherlands.

Lisa Birnbach's College Book has recognized him as the best teacher at Penn, and he has received the History Department's teaching prize and all of the University's major awards -- the Lindback and Abrams Prizes, the Senior Class Award, and the Richard Dunn Prize. The Teaching Company of Washington, D. C., has taped his lectures in its Superstar Teachers series. He has taught courses in American political, diplomatic, and intellectual history; and in the philosophy of history, and has lectured extensively on a wide range of subjects to both academic and general audiences.

The recipient of grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, Kuklick has also been a member of the Stanford University Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Elected to the American Philosophical Society, he has consulted for various universities, philanthropic institutions, and governmental agencies; and he belongs to many scholarly professional associations including the Organization of American Historians, and the American Philosophical Association.

Kuklick is the author of books of a number of books, including his history of American thought Churchmen and Philosophers: Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey (l985); The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge Massachusetts , l860-l930 (l976); and Philosophy in America, 1720-2000 (2001). The second of these three won the Phi Beta Kappa book award in the humanities, while Churchmen and Philosophers has been the subject of a symposium sponsored by the American Academy of Religion. His most popular and successful book is one on baseball history, To Every Thing a Season: Shibe Park and Urban Philadelphia (1991), which has won the Casey Award and the SABR-Macmillan Baseball Prize. It continues to be a small press best seller.

His most recent books are Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger (2006); a biography of African American philosopher William Fontaine, Black Philosopher; White Academy (2008); and a political history of the United States, One Nation Under God (2009). He is at work on a monograph on historical knowledge; and with Emmanuel Gerard a history of the assassination of the Congo 's Patrice Lumumba in 1960.

Kuklick is married and the father of four children. He lives in Philadelphia .