Professor Nicholas Guyatt

Nicholas Guyatt is Professor of North American History at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Jesus College.

Academic interests

My work focuses on questions of race, empire and citizenship in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I’m particularly interested in the construction of racial categories and in the relationship between universalist ideas (especially ideas of equality) and the management of racial diversity in the early American republic. I’m also interested in how Americans thought about the world beyond the United States, and in the role of American thinkers and politics in shaping ideas about world order in the long nineteenth century.

Degrees obtained

• BA, Cantab.
• MPhil, Cantab.
• PhD, Princeton.

Awards and prizes

• Commended Lecturer, CUSU Student-Led Teaching Awards, 2019.
• Elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, 2015.
• British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, 2013-14.
• Vice-Chancellor’s Teaching Award, University of York, 2012.
• Stanford Humanities Center External Faculty Fellowship, 2009-10. 

Biography

I did my first degree in English here at Cambridge, then migrated to the MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History before beginning a PhD in History. For a number of reasons, mostly my good fortune in receiving a Procter Fellowship, I moved to Princeton University and completed my doctorate under the direction of Daniel T. Rodgers. I then taught in Princeton and, for three years, at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. In 2008 I came back to the UK to teach history at the University of York, and in 2014 I was appointed to my current post at Cambridge.

I’ve written on a variety of topics in American history from the colonial period to the very recent past. My first monograph, Providence and the Invention of the United States, was a study of American ideas of providential nationalism – the belief that God had a special role for the United States in history. My second book, Bind Us Apart, explored the disconcerting relationship between ideas of racial equality among white Americans and programmes for ‘colonising’ African Americans and Native Americans in separate homelands.

I’m currently working on a book about Dartmoor Prison, and especially the 6500 Americans who were held there during the War of 1812. (Around a thousand of whom were black.) I’m also editing the Oxford Illustrated History of the United States, and tinkering with another project on how Americans developed ideas about imperialism in the nineteenth century by studying other people’s empires.

I’ve written three trashier books on completely different subjects, including one on the significance of Bible prophecy to evangelical Christians in the contemporary United States. (The title – Have a Nice Doomsday – was not my idea.) I’ve written about American history and politics for the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, the Nation, the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books. I’ve also been a guest or adviser on a number of TV and radio programmes exploring American history, including Radio 4’s In Our Time and BBC Four’s Racism: A history.

Other interests

Baking, gardening, hiking, trolling my children.