Associate Professor bdsteele@uab.edu
Heritage Hall 356
(205) 934-5487

Research and Teaching Interests: American intellectual and cultural history, American Revolution and early republic, historiography, nationalism, gender

Office Hours: M/W 11 a.m. - 12:10 p.m.

Education:

• B.A., University of Tulsa
• M.A., University of Tulsa
• Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2003

I specialize in American intellectual and political history with a particular emphasis on the American Revolution and Early American Republic. My first book Thomas Jefferson and American Nationhood (Cambridge, 2012) was a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize and was named a 2012 notable title by the Society for US Intellectual History.

I teach a wide variety of courses on the graduate and undergraduate level, including Writing and Ratification of the Constitution, the American Revolution, and Capitalism and Democracy in the Early American Republic, as well as special seminars on Lincoln and Jefferson. I’ve been thinking a lot more about the 19th century as a whole and about the relationship between the early republic and the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. I’m broadly interested in the relationship between literature and history, fiction, and historical narrative and am working on a book project about the relationship between memory and history in the first stories told about the early republic (those told by contemporaries who had lived through the events themselves).

I tend to teach and write what you might think of broadly as American Studies, so you may find me teaching courses that range widely across chronology (like my course on the Idea of America) and territory (like my honors seminar on Citizenship, Statelessness, and Human Rights in the Modern World). All of my courses consider the intersections of politics, culture, and thought, and encourage students to think about the cultural productions of an era (novels, poetry, film) as historical artifacts that offer us insight about meaning and the human condition in a particular time and place. One of my favorite courses to teach is our M.A. Seminar on Historiography, which has given me the opportunity to think a lot about what historians do and what makes historical inquiry a uniquely human preoccupation, a way of seeing — and loving — the world.