James Connolly
George and Frances Ball Distinguished Professor of History and Director Center Middletown Studies and Professor of History
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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Vita