In this informal, one-hour lecture, Prof. Paul Kramer of Vanderbilt University, speaks to his undergraduate students in the course “Writing for Social Change” on some principles and practices to keep in mind when workshopping each other’s writings. He focuses on one-on-one conversations between peers, but much of the lecture can…

Vanderbilt Magazine, October 3, 2022 “When Associate Professor of History Paul Kramer decided to speak out against the use of waterboarding by U.S. forces during the Iraq War, he took an unfamiliar approach. Rather than write an academic article directed only at his colleagues, he tried his hand at a historical narrative…

This essay explores the invention of the “global” and its role in the formation of transnational history, through a review of Isaac Kamola’s Making the World Global. As Kamola argues, global thinking reflected a particular, late-20th century moment in the history of U. S. universities and foundations, one characterized by the ascendancy of business and marketing ideologies, declining state support for area studies, and the pursuit of private investment and tuition-paying international students. As this essay argues, global discourse’s emphasis on flow, linkage and exchange informed what can usefully be called a connectionist scholarship that was structured by inquiries into connectivity and a normative valorization of connectedness; this framing profoundly shaped ideas of transnational history as scholarly enterprise. Understanding this genealogy is necessary in order to open space for other definitions of what transnational history is and might become.

This longform narrative history in the Los Angeles Review of Books, based on extensive interview and newspaper research, explores the surprising, forgotten history of Los Angeles’ first sanctuary city declaration–in November 1985—as a lens onto the historical crossings of urban politics, U. S. foreign relations, and struggles over the place of migrants and refugees in American society in an era of Cold War intervention and rising racist and nativist mobilization. Activists in the city successfully pressured idealistic council members to shepherd an ambitious sanctuary resolution through to a narrow passage, in a triumph for the sanctuary and solidarity movements nationally. But an unexpected backlash against the resolution, driven by nativist public officials cultivating moral panic, pushed sanctuary’s advocates onto the defensive. The struggle ultimately involved debates about American cities’ relationships to U. S. imperial intervention in the wider world.

This historiographic essay explores and critiques existing approaches to the study of racialized power in the United States’ transnational histories and, especially, the study of US foreign relations. It advances a new conceptual approach to histories of racialization, and discussing race as a dimension of sovereignty, policy-making, culture, transnational solidarities, cross-national transfer, migration, capitalism and militarization.

This historiographic essay discusses, promotes and critiques “new histories of American capitalism,” arguing for the benefits of reframing this enterprise methodologically, as political-economic history, and making the case for the necessity and multiple, reciprocal benefits of connecting histories of capitalism to histories of the United States in the world. It then presents ongoing research by historians of the US in the world that deals with political-economic themes, including scholarship on commodities, consumption, law, debt, militarization, migration, labor, race and knowledge regimes.

This interpretive essay makes the case for integrating histories of US immigration politics with imperial histories of the US in the world, specifically by foregrounding and problematizing transnational and global hierarchies and power relations, and thematizing the opening (as well as closing) of the US immigration regime as a function of geopolitical agendas. It explores and reframes the rich, growing landscape of scholarship at the intersection of US immigration and foreign relations, and discusses the instrumentalizing of US immigration policy for purposes of labor access, colonial management, diffusion, legitimation, enmity, and rescue.

The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 19, 2017 What role might historians committed to democratic and egalitarian politics play in challenging authoritarianism?  This essay takes on conventional claims that history is absent from public debate, and that it has “lessons” to teach, arguing instead that historical thinking is ever-present and…

This investigative history examines the consequences of war and securitization after 9/11 for US disaster preparedness, using the example of the post-Hurricane Katrina catastrophe in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.  While commonly understood as separate events, the “war on terror” and Hurricane Katrina were deeply entwined, from the siphoning…

This interview segment with NPR’s On the Media explores the political and symbolic history of the Statue of Liberty as an icon of immigration, drawing on research from the Slate piece “Who Does She Stand For?

How governments use “remote control” policies to prevent asylum seekers coming anywhere close to refuge.

How did the US immigration debate get to be so divisive? In this informative talk, historian and writer Paul A. Kramer shows how an “insider vs. outsider” framing has come to dominate the way people in the US talk about immigration — and suggests a set of new questions that could reshape the conversation around whose life, rights and thriving matters.

This historiographic essay explores recent innovations in the rescaling of U. S. historical writing and makes the case for the imperial as an analytic category necessary to this effort. Thinking with the imperial, it argues, foregrounds asymmetries of power and connections between societies, while facilitating non-exceptionalist comparisons. The essay’s themes include exceptionalism, methodological nationalism, structure and agency, and the oscillating presence of the imperial in U. S. historiography.

In 1899 the United States, having announced its arrival as a world power during the Spanish-Cuban-American War, inaugurated a brutal war of imperial conquest against the Philippine Republic. Over the next five decades, U.S. imperialists justified their colonial empire by crafting novel racial ideologies adapted to new realities of collaboration and anticolonial resistance. In this pathbreaking, transnational study, Paul A. Kramer reveals how racial politics served U.S. empire, and how empire-building in turn transformed ideas of race and nation in both the United States and the Philippines.

This lecture and discussion over Zoom covers the practical do’s and don’t’s of launching your first academic book, with an eye towards both the steps you can take to help get your ideas out into the world, and the role this process can play for academic exchange and building and sustaining intellectual community.

This narrative piece, selected by The Best American Essays 2012 as a “notable essay,” tells the story of Rev. Jesse Routté, an African American Lutheran minister in New York who, in response to racist abuse during a 1943 trip to Mobile, Alabama, returned four years later disguised as a turbaned, Swedish-accented “foreigner.” When he reported positive treatment, it flaunted contradictions in Jim Crow’s racial definitions.

This brief memo discusses the crucial but somewhat esoteric “statement of purpose” required in PhD applications in the humanities and social sciences: what they are supposed to accomplish, what they ought to contain, and ways they can be more (and less) effective.