Stephen Kantrowitz

Stephen Kantrowitz is Linda and Stanley Sher Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where his research focuses on questions of citizenship and belonging in the United States. He is the author of Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy (University of North Carolina Press, 2000) and More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829-1889 (Penguin Books, 2013), which was a finalist for the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize and Frederick Douglass Book Prize in 2013. His most recent book, Citizens of a Stolen Land: A Ho-Chunk History of the Nineteenth-Century United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2023), reconsiders the history of citizenship from the standpoint of Native American resistance to American claims.

An award-winning teacher, he has also worked on numerous community and public history projects. He has been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and a Fulbright Distinguished Professor. Kantrowitz holds a BA from Yale University, a PhD from Princeton University, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Southern Denmark.

Kantrowitz’s project, “Who is an American? The Contested History of U.S. Citizenship,” will explore how divergent understandings and experiences of inclusion and exclusion have influenced who the United States has welcomed, who it has excluded or subordinated, and, in the end, how struggles over these questions have defined the nation. Drawing on histories of migration, law, territorial conquest, slavery and emancipation, gender, family, and labor, he will provide nonspecialists with clear, rigorous explanations of how interlocking histories have shaped — and will continue to shape — some of the most contentious questions in our national life.

May 2026