Historian Bruce Dorsey 
Awarded Professorship in Germany

by Stacey Kutish
1/22/2009

Associate Professor of History Bruce Dorsey

Bruce Dorsey, associate professor and chair of the Department of History, was awarded a DAAD Visiting Professorship to teach in Germany at the University of Erfurt this spring and summer.  A social and cultural historian, Dorsey has written on the history of religion, gender, and reform in early America.  In Germany, he will teach undergraduate courses on the cultural history of the United States and on the history of religion in America, as well as a graduate seminar on the history of religion and sexuality in America.

Dorsey recently completed a two-volume primary-source reader in U.S. history, Crosscurrents in American Culture (Houghton Mifflin, 2009), the first anthology devoted entirely to documents that illuminate the cultural history of America. His next book, Murder in a Mill Town, is based on a course he teaches at Swarthmore and examines the records of an 1833 murder trial to teach the social, cultural, and religious history of industrialization in the early American republic.