Sean Wilentz

Sean Wilentz is the George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History at Princeton University, where he has taught since 1979. He received his Ph.D. in history from Yale University (1980) after earning bachelor’s degrees from Columbia University (1972) and Balliol College, Oxford University (1974). He is the author or editor of thirteen books, including The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (2005), which was awarded the Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His writings on American music have earned him two Grammy nominations and two Deems-Taylor-ASCAP awards. (He also holds the semi-facetious title of Historian-in-Residence at Bob Dylan's official website, www.bobdylan.com.) Professor Wilentz lectures frequently and has written some four hundred articles, reviews, and op-ed pieces for publications such as the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, Le Monde, and Dissent. He has helped prepare speeches and congressional testimony, most notably his own testimony before the House Judiciary Committee in conjunction with the impeachment drive against President Bill Clinton in December 1998. He spent the academic year 2014-15 as the Leah and Michael Weisberg Fellow at the New-York Historical Society and the Siemens Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. He also delivered the annual Nathan I. Huggins Lectures at Harvard, which he is now preparing for publication as "No Property in Man": The Origins of American Antislavery Politics.