Faculty & Staff

Jeffrey Sklansky

Associate Professor
U.S. 19th & 20th Century Cultural and Intellectual History
Department of History
303E Milam Hall
Corvallis, OR 97331
Phone: (541) 737-7780
Fax: (541) 737-1257
Email: jeffrey.sklansky@oregonstate.edu

Jeffrey Sklansky specializes in American intellectual and cultural history, particularly the history of political and economic thought. In addition to teaching introductory surveys of U.S. history, he has offered courses on American thought and culture from the colonial era to the present, the history of the social sciences, the industrial revolution, labor history, and the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era.

Background

• After graduating from the University of California at Berkeley in 1988, Sklansky received his M.A. (1991) and Ph.D. (1996) in History from Columbia University, where he did his doctoral work on the ideological roots of modern American social science. From there he went to Northwestern University as a postdoctoral fellow in the Science in Human Culture program, then came to Oregon State in 1997.
• His first book, The Soul’s Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820-1920 (University of North Carolina Press, 2002), won the 2004 Cheiron Book Prize from Cheiron, the International Society for the History of Behavioral and Social Sciences. He is currently working on a book provisionally entitled The Money Question: Currency in American Political Thought, 1700-1900, which traces the rise and fall of the 200-year struggle over what should serve as money, who should control its creation and circulation, and according to what rules. His work has been supported by year-long fellowships from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University, and the American Council of Learned Societies. As of 2007, he is also editor of the book series, “New Studies in American Intellectual and Cultural History,” from Johns Hopkins University Press.

Publications

• “Business and Solitude,” Modern Intellectual History 3:2 (Aug. 2006): 357-369.

• “‘A Bank on Parnassus’: Nicholas Biddle and the Beauty of Banking,” Common-place 6:3 (April 2006).

• “Progress and Populism,” Reviews in American History 32 (March 2004): 58-67.

• The Soul’s Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

• "Corporate Property and Social Psychology: Thomas M. Cooley, Charles H. Cooley, and the Ideological Origins of the Social Self,” Radical History Review 76 (Winter 2000): 90-114.

• “Pauperism and Poverty: Henry George, William Graham Sumner, and the Ideological Origins of Modern American Social Science,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 35:2 (Spring 1999): 111-138.

• “The Science of Integration,” Dissent 44:3 (Summer 1997): 118-122.

• James Farmer: Civil Rights Leader (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1992). One in a series of short biographies for young adults on “Black Americans of Achievement.”

• “Rock, Reservation and Prison: The Native American Occupation of Alcatraz Island,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 13:2 (1989): 29-68.