Gary Gerstle is Paul Mellon Professor of American History Emeritus at the University of Cambridge. Gerstle received his BA from Brown University and his MA and PhD from Harvard University. He is the author, editor, and coeditor of more than ten books.  He is currently the Joy Foundation Fellow at the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, where he is working on a new book, Politics in Our Time: Authoritarian Peril and Democratic Hope in the Twenty-First Century.  He resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Scholarship

Gerstle’s earliest interests lay in the history of labor and political economy. In 1989 he published both Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City and a co-edited book, The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980.  His exploration of questions of immigration, race, and nationality culminated in the 2001 publication of the prizewinning American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century, reissued with a new chapter on ‘Race and Nation in the Age of Obama’ in 2017. To answer questions about the American state that had long confounded him, Gerstle undertook a ten-year project that produced his most sweeping study, the prizewinning Liberty and Coercion: Paradoxes of American Government from the Founding to the Present (2015). 

To make sense of the Brexit and Trump earthquakes of 2016, Gerstle returned to insights gained from his earliest work on the connections between economics and politics. The result was The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era (2022).  The book has been translated into multiple languages, made ‘Best Books’ lists in the US, UK, the Netherlands, and India, and was shortlisted for the 2022 Financial Times Best Business Book of the Year.

Media

Gerstle has written for the Guardian, the New Statesman, the New York Review of Books, the Atlantic, Dissent, the Nation, Unherd, Project Syndicate, and Die Zeit. He has designed and narrated a four-part series on American democracy for BBC World Service. He has participated in scores of podcasts, most ambitiously with David Runciman and Helen Thompson at Talking Politics and, most recently, with David Runciman at Past, Present, Future. With Noam Maggor and with support from the Hewlett Foundation, Gerstle is organizing a major international conference, “Building a Post-Neoliberal World: Paths to a New Economy and Politics,” to be held at the University of Cambridge in May 2025. 

Fellowships, Lectures, and Honors

Gerstle’s fellowships include those from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), the Davis Center (Princeton), and the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute. He has served as the Annenberg Visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, as Visiting Professor at the Ecoles des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, and as the Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at Oxford. He has lectured throughout North America and Europe, and in Brazil, Israel, Japan, Mexico, South Africa, and South Korea. His writings have been translated into Arabic, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, and Spanish. 

Gerstle is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also a member of the Society for American Historians, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians.

In 2026, Gerstle will hold the Kluge Professorship of American Law and Governance at the Library of Congress.