Preston Hotchkis Professor Emeritus
Education
Research Interests
America since 1607: intellectual
Recent Papers Available Electronically
"The Evangelical Capture of the Republican Party and Its Implications for Academia," Social Research, July 2025.
"Guard of Honor against Misogyny and White Supremacy," Women's Studies (Summer 2021).
"The Global South, Christianity, and Secularization: Insider and Outsider Perspectives," Modern Intellectual History XVII (2020), 889-901.
"Christianity and Its American Fate: Where History Interrogates Secularization Theory," in Joel Isaac, et al., The Worlds of American Intellectual History (New York, 2016)
"William James, Ecumenical Protestantism, and the Dynamics of Secularization," in Martin Halliwell and Joel D.S. Rasmussen, eds., William James and the Transatlantic Conversation.
"The Wedge Driving Academia's Two Families Apart," Chronicle of Higher Education, October 14, 2013.
"After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Ecumenical Protestantism and the Modern American Encounter with Diversity" Journal of American History (June 2011), 21-48.
"The Accommodation of Protestant Christianity with the Enlightenment: An Old Drama Still Being Enacted" Daedalus Winter 2012, 76-88.
"What is Our 'Canon'? How American Intellectual Historians Debate the Core of Their Field" Modern Intellectual History 9. 1 (2012), 185–200.
"The Concept of Post-Racial: How Its Easy Dismissal Obscures Important Questions" Daedalus Winter2011, 174-182.
"Being Really Good vs. Being Really Public: Is This Our Choice?" Townsend Center Newsletter, April/May 2010, 21-23
"Church People and Others" in James Banner and John Gillis, eds. Becoming Historians (Chicago,2009), 101- 121.
"Religious Ideas: Should They be Critically Engaged or Given a Pass?" Representations #101 (2008), 144-154.
"Separation Anxiety," London Review of Books, January 24, 2008, 15-18. [Review of Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God].
"Obama, the Instability of Color Lines, and the Promise of a Postethnic Future" Callaloo 31.4 (2008), 1033-1037.
"Rethinking Diversity," California Magazine (July/August 2006), 47-49.
"From Identity to Solidarity," Daedalus (Fall 2006), 23-31.
"The One Drop Rule and the One Hate Rule," Daedalus (Winter 2005), 18-28.
"Damned for God’s Glory: William James and the Scientific Vindication of Protestant Culture," in Wayne Proudfoot, ed., Re-Experiencing Varieties: William James and a Science of Religion (New York, 2004), 9-30.
"Amalgamation and Hypodescent: The Question of Ethnoracial Mixture in the History of the United States," American Historical Review (December, 2003), 1363-1390.
Books
Christianity's American Fate: How Religion Became More Conservative and Society More Secular (Princeton University Press, 2022).
When this Mask of Flesh is Broken: The Story of an American Protestant Family (Outskirts Press, 2019).
Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America (Princeton University Press, 2017).
The American Intellectual Tradition: A Source Book (Oxford University Press, 7th ed., 2015) [co-edited with Charles Capper].
After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History (Princeton University Press, 2013).
Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity: Studies in Ethnoracial, Religious, and Professional Affiliation in the United States (University of Wisconsin Press, 2006).
The Humanities and the Dynamics of Inclusion Since World War Two (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). [Edited for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences].
Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (Basic Books, 1995; paperback edition, Basic Books, 1996; Fifth Anniversary Edition with "Postscript 2000," 2000; Tenth Anniversary Edition with "Postscript 2005," 2006).
Reappraising Oppenheimer: Centennial Studies and Reflections (Berkeley, 2005) [co-edited with Cathryn Carson].
Science, Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth Century American Intellectual History (Princeton University Press, 1996; paperback edition 1999).
In the American Province: Studies in the History and Historiography of Ideas (Indiana University Press, 1985, paperback edition, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).
Morris R. Cohen and the Scientific Ideal (MIT Press, 1975).
Recent Articles (Since 2019)
“The Evangelical Capture of the Republican Party and Its Implications for Academia,” Social Research (forthcoming, 2025).
“The Critiques of Evangelical Writers Opposing Christian Nationalism Fail to Recognize Evangelicalism’s Troubling History,” Religion Dispatches, June 18, 2024.
“American Missionaries and the Struggle for Control of Christianity’s Symbolic Capital,” in David Golding and Christopher Cannon Jones, eds., Missionary Interests: Protestant and Mormon Missionaries (Ithaca, 2024).
"The Historic Struggle to Control American Christianity," Messenger (January-February 2023), 23-25.
“A Test of Character? America and the World Since 1945” H-Diplo, May 19, 2022.
“Guard of Honor against Misogyny and White Supremacy,” Women’s Studies (Summer 2021).
"The Global South, Christianity, and Secularization: Insider and Outsider Perspectives," Modern Intellectual History (September, 2020), 889-901.
“A Double Whammy for the History of Evangelical Protestantism,” Modern American History (April 2020), 269-272.
“Between Samuel Flagg Bemis and Perry Miller,” H-Diplo, February 8, 2020.
“Elegy at Baker Island: Charles W. Eliot’s Maritime Pastoral, Chebacco (2019), 67-73.
"Charles Capper, Romantic America, and Intellectual History," Modern Intellectual History (April 2019), 281-293.
About Professor Hollinger
Member of American Philosophical Society and American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, and Harmsworth Professor of the University of Oxford. Past President (2010-2011) Organization of American Historians.
Born April 25, 1941 (Chicago, Illinois)
