Russell Kazal

Biography

Russell Kazal's research and teaching interests are in the social and (broadly defined) political history of the United States since 1877, with a focus on immigration, ethnicity and race, urban America, and ideologies of pluralism and nationalism.

His book, Becoming Old Stock: The Paradox of German-American Identity (2004), examines how Americans of German background -- arguably the United States' largest ethnic group -- backed away from that ethnic identity in the early twentieth century and redefined themselves in ways informed by race, class, religion, and American nationalism.

Other publications include "Revisiting Assimilation: The Rise, Fall, and Reappraisal of a Concept in American Ethnic History" (American Historical Review, 1995), and, "The Interwar Origins of the White Ethnic: Race, Residence, and German Philadelphia, 1917-1939" (Journal of American Ethnic History, 2004), which won the Immigration and Ethnic History Society's Carlton C. Qualey Award.

His current research project, "The Regional and Immigrant Roots of American Multiculturalism," examines the emergence of popular notions of ethnic pluralism in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Education

A.B. (Princeton)

M.A., Ph.D. (Pennsylvania)