Curriculum Vitae

American cultural history, urban history, history of the United States in transnational perspective

Brooke Blower teaches courses and supervises graduate students in the fields of American cultural history, urban history, and the history of the United States in transnational perspective. Her own research focuses on modern American politics and culture in an international framework.

Her first book, Becoming Americans in Paris: Transatlantic Politics and Culture between the World Wars was published by Oxford University Press in January 2011 and won the Gilbert Chinard Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies. This book overturns the old American clichés about “Gay Paree,“ offering a darker and more nuanced portrait of how Americans helped to shape the cultural politics of Paris between the wars, and, at the same time, how Paris helped to shape modern American political culture. Drawing on a range of sources in French as well as English, the book uncovers the breadth of American activities in Paris, the lessons visitors drew from their stay, and the passionate responses they elicited from others. For many sojourners—not just for those most famous expatriates—the capital served as an important crossroads, a place where Americans reimagined their position in the world and grappled with what it meant to be American in the new century, even as they came up against conflicting interpretations of American power by others.

She is also the author of articles in Prospects, Reviews in American History, and Blackwell’s forthcoming Companion to American Urban History. At present, she is working on a new book, which will explore the political and cultural history of Americans abroad during World War II.