L. Herbert Ballou University Professor of Africana Studies and American Studies

Overview

Matthew Guterl is a historian of the United States from the Civil War to the present, with extensive expertise in the history of race-relations, civil and human rights, and empire. He earned his BA from what was then called Stockton State College in 1993 (now Stockton University) and his PhD from Rutgers University in 1999.

Guterl is the author of five scholarly monographs, including The Color of Race in America, 1900-1940 (Harvard, 2001), American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders and the Age of Emancipation (Harvard, 2008), and Josephine Baker and the Rainbow Tribe (Harvard, 2014). 

His memoir about growing up in a multiracial adoptive household, Skinfolk, was published in 2023 by Liveright, the literary imprint of Norton. 

He is presently working on a global biography of the queer, cosmopolitan, human rights activist, Roger Casement, soon to be published by Liveright. The book is tentatively titled: The Hanged Man: Roger Casement, the Great War, and the Human Rights Revolution.

Guterl has begun researching a new project on the 1970s, titled The Troubles, focusing on the connections and disjunctions, the parallels and divergencies of Black radical politics and "The Troubles" in Northern Ireland. Beyond uncovering the longer historic entanglements of Black/Irish radicalisms, the work will look at the specific conditions of that disastrous decade, illuminating the power of art and culture, and showcasing moments of solidarity, of discovery, and of disillusionment.

He is also writing a monograph on racial passing in the present, long after the supposed heyday of the phenomenon, for the University of North Carolina Press. 

Brown Affiliations

Research Areas

On the Web