Emeriti Faculty

Alan Kraut

Cornell University

Alan M. Kraut specializes in immigration and ethnic history and the history of medicine in the United States. He is the author or editor of nine books and many scholarly articles. Volumesinclude The Huddled Masses, the Immigrant in American Society, 1880-1921 (1982; 2nd ed. 2001); Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes and the “Immigrant Menace.” (1994); and Goldberger’s War: The life and Work of a Public Health Crusader (2003). A study of U.S. Public Health Service physician Dr. Joseph Godberger’s investigation of pellagra in the early twentieth century South. Silent Travelers won the Theodore Saloutos Prize (Immigration and Ethnic History Society). Goldberger’s War received the Henry Adams Prize (Society for History in the Federal Government) and the Arthur Viseltear Prize (American Public Health Association). In 2007 he and his wife, Deborah, co-authored Covenant of Care: Newark Beth Israel and the Jewish Hospital in American. In 2013 he published Ethnic Historians and the Mainstream: Shaping America’s Immigration Story (co-edited). He is currently writing a history of xenophobia and nativism throughout American history. Kraut’s research has been supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, the Smithsonian Institution, and the National Institutes of Health. He is a past Present of the Organization of American Historians and is the current President of the National Coalition for History. He is an elected fellow of the prestigious Society of American Historians. In 2017 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society.

April Shelford

Princeton University

April G. Shelford is an intellectual historian of early modern Europe. In Fall 2023, she published her second book, A Caribbean Enlightenment: Intelectual Life in the British and French Colonial Worlds, 1970-1792 with Cambridge University Press. The book was inspired by a two-year visiting professorship at the University of the West Indies, Jamica, which she held before coming to American University in 2001. Her research into the eighteenth-century Caribbean has also resulted in several articles and a book chapter. Shelford initially trained in the history of the seventeenth-century Republic of Letters, focusing on French scholar Pierre-Daniel Huet (1630-1721). He was the subject of her first book, Transofrming the Republic of Letters, which was published by University of Rochester in 2007. 

Richard Breitman 

Harvard University

Richard Breitman is the author or co-author of twelve books and many articles in German history, US history, and the Holocaust. His books The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution (New York: Knopf, 1991) and Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), were translated into five foreign languages. FDR and the Jews, co-authored with Allan J. Lichtman, won the 2013 National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish Studies and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History. His latest book, The Berlin Mission: The American Who Resisted Nazi Germany from Within, was published by Public Affairs in late 2019.

Breitman is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at American University and is editor of the journal Holocaust and Genocide Studies. He received his BA from Yale and his MA and PhD from Harvard. He received an honorary doctorate from Hebrew Union College. He received the distinguished achievement award for Holocaust studies and research from the Holocaust Educational Foundation in 2018. He lives in the Washington, DC, area. 

Roger H. Brown

Harvard University

A member of the active faculty for over thirty years, Professor Brown is a historian of early America whose books include Republic in Peril: 1812 and Redeeming the Republic: Federalists, Taxation, and the Origins of the Constitution. He founded the university's Friends of the AU Library and still teaches courses on early America.

James A Malloy

Ohio State University

A historian of Russia and Eastern Europe, Professor Malloy's early research on the Zemstrov Reform in Tsarist Russia led to a series of important journal articles. Much of his later work focused on US-Soviet space exploration, including a monograph, US-USSR Space Negotiations and Cooperation, 1958-1965. For almost two decades, Professor Malloy advised and led American University's chapter of Phi Alpha Theta, the history honorary.