Robert Gross

A native of Bridgeport, Connecticut, Robert A. Gross received the B.A. in American civilization from the University of Pennsylvania in 1966 and the M.A. (1968) and Ph.D. (1976) in history from Columbia University. He taught at Amherst College (1976-88), the University of Sussex (1981-83) and the College of William and Mary (1988-2003) before coming to UConn. He is the recipient of various national awards, including fellowships from the Guggenheim, Howard, and Rockefeller Foundations, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Antiquarian Society.

Prof. Gross specializes in the social and cultural history of the U.S., from the colonial era through the nineteenth century. His first book on the American Revolution, The Minutemen and Their World (1976), won the Bancroft Prize in American History; it was issued in a 25th anniversary edition in 2001. He has continued studies of the Revolutionary era in such works as In Debt to Shays: The Bicentennial of an Agrarian Rebellion (1993). His other recent work examines New England writers -- notably, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Emily Dickinson -- in historical context. From that project has come The Transcendentalists and Their World, to be published by Hill & Wang in 2004. A onetime journalist at Newsweek and free-lance writer for Harper's, Saturday Review, and Book World, Prof. Gross addresses his scholarship to academic and general audiences alike. He has consulted on museum exhibitions and documentary films, lectured as a Fulbright scholar in Brazil, Denmark, Italy, and the Netherlands, devised public humanities programs for the Bicentennial of the Constitution, and most recently, directed a NEH summer institute at William and Mary to commemorate the life and thought of Thomas Jefferson. He has served as chair of the Program in the History of the Book in American Culture at the American Antiquarian Society and as book review editor of the William and Mary Quarterly.

Professor Gross is an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer for the years 2005-2008.