Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Christopher Grasso is Professor in the Department of History and a historian of American culture, religion, and politics. His research and writing have focused on the 18th and 19th centuries. He is the author of A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut (UNC Press, 1999) and Skepticism and American Faith: From the Revolution to the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 2018), which won the SHEAR Book Prize. He has received year-long grants from the NEH, ACLS, and National Humanities Center and has published essays in journals including the William and Mary Quarterly, the Journal of the Early Republic, and The Journal of American History. His latest book is Teacher, Preacher, Soldier, Spy: The Civil Wars of John R. Kelso (Oxford University Press, 2021); he also edited part of Kelso’s Civil War memoir for Yale University Press as Bloody Engagements: John R. Kelso’s Civil War (2017). Before coming to Brown in 2022, he was the Pullen Professor of History at William and Mary. He earned his Ph.D. from Yale in 1992 and also taught at St. Olaf College. He was editor of the William and Mary Quarterly from 2000 to 2013.