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Teaching and Research Specialties
Late 19th and early 20th-century, U.S. political; urban, ethnic

Biography

James Connolly is George and Frances Ball Distinguished Professor of History, Director of the Center for Middletown Studies, and Co-Director of the Digital Scholarship Lab. His research research focuses on American urban, political, cultural, and ethnic history during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is co-author with Frank Felsenstein of What Middletown Read: Print Culture in an American Small City (University of Massachusetts Press, 2015) and the author of An Elusive Unity: Urban Democracy and Machine Politics in Industrializing America (Cornell University Press, 2010) and The Triumph of Ethnic Progressivism: Urban Political Culture in Boston, 1900-1925 (Harvard University Press, 1998). He is also co-editor of Print Culture Histories Beyond the Metropolis (University of Toronto Press, 2016) and After the Factory: Reinventing America’s Industrial Small Cities (Lexington Books, 2010) and has published articles and essays in edited volumes and journals such as Social Science History, the Journal of Urban History, the Journal of Policy History, and the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Connolly has also helped produce a number of digital and media projects, including the What Middletown Read online database and the documentary film Changing Gears: End of an Era (2011).

 

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