Paul S. Boyer
Merle Curti Professor of History Emeritus

eMail: psboyer@wisc.edu
Phone: (608)233-7202
Office: Off Campus

Education: PhD: Harvard; MA: Harvard; BA: Harvard

Bio Sketch:

Paul Boyer, a U.S. cultural and intellectual historian (Ph.D., Harvard University, 1966) is Merle Curti Professor of History Emeritus and former director (1993-2001) of the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  He has held visiting professorships at UCLA, Northwestern University, and William & Mary; has received Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships; and is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Society of American Historians, and the American Antiquarian Society.  Before coming to Wisconsin in 1980, he taught at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst (1967-1980).
He has lectured at some 90 colleges and universities in the United States, Western Europe, and Israel.  He has appeared on programs on the Public Broadcasting System, National Public Radio, the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, the BBC, Canadian Broadcasting System, and others.

Research Interests:

American cultural and intellectual history; American religious history; Prophetic and apocalyptic belief in America; Censorship and First Amendment Issues; nuclear weapons in American culture, Salem witchcraft.

Selected Publications:

• Purity in Print: Book Censorship in America from the Gilded Age to the Computer Age (NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1968;  2nd edition with two new chapters, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002)
• Notable American Women, 1600-1950 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 3 vols., 1971).  Assistant editor.
• Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974). Co-author with Stephen Nissenbaum.
• The Salem Witchcraft Papers, co-editor with Stephen Nissenbaum (3 vols., NY: DaCapo Press, 1977)
• Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978)
• By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (NY: Pantheon, 1985; 2nd edn. with a new introduction, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994)
• Reagan as President: Contemporary Views of the Man, His Politics, and His Politicies Edited with an Introduction by Paul Boyer (Chicago, Ivan R. Dee, 1990).
• When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992)
• Fallout: A Historian Reflects on America's Half-Century Encounter With Nuclear Weapons (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998)
• Editor-in-Chief, The Oxford Companion to United States History (NY: Oxford University Press, 2001).
• Boyer is the author or co-author of two college-level U.S. history textbooks published by Houghton-Mifflin, The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People (6th edition, 2007); and Promises to Keep: The United States Since 1945 (3rd edn., 2004), and a high-school U.S. history textbook: The American Nation (Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 4th edn., 2002).
• His scholarly articles have appeared in the Journal of American History, American Quarterly, American Literary History, The History Teacher, Virginia Quarterly Review, William & Mary Quarterly, and others. He has contributed numerous chapters to scholarly book and encyclopedia essays. His articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post Magazine, Book World, the New Republic, The Nation, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Wisconsin Academy Review, Harvard Divinity School Bulletin, Reflections (Yale Divinity School); Arms Control Today, Journal of the American Medial Association, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Tikkun, Policy Review, Christian Century, Wisconsin Academy Review, and other publications.
• He is also editor of a monograph series, Studies in American Thought and Culture, published by the University of Wisconsin Press.

Awards:

• Salem Possessed won the John H. Dunning Prize of the American Historical Association and was nominated for a National Book Award. 
• When Time Shall Be No More received the Banta Award of the Wisconsin Library Association for literary achievement by a Wisconsin author. 
• The Oxford Companion to United States History was a main selection of History Book Club.

Courses Taught:

• Hist. 302: American Thought and Culture, 1859 to the Present
• Hist. 901: Reading Seminar in American Intellectual History
• Hist. 902: Research Seminar in American Intellectual History