James Johnson is a cultural historian who writes and teaches on modern and early modern Europe. His research includes eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France, the history of Venice, and music history. His book Listening in Paris: A Cultural History received the AHA’s Herbert Baxter Adams Award and the APA’s Jacques Barzun Prize. His current work is on identity, concealment, and the self in modern and early modern Europe. His book Venice Incognito: Masks in the Serene Republic received the AHA’s George L. Mosse Award and Oscar Kenshur Book Prize. He is now at work on its successor, Disguised Intentions: Concealment in the City of Light.
Professor Johnson is the recipient of numerous research fellowships, including grants from the Fulbright Scholar Program and the American Council of Learned Societies. In 2014-15, he was a Guggenheim Fellow. For six years, he was Assistant Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Director of its Core Curriculum. Between 1999 and 2002, he served as NEH Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Humanities.
Professor Johnson has taught courses cover nineteenth- and twentieth-century European intellectual history, nineteenth-century France, the history of Boston, the culture of World War I, and postwar European culture. He has designed and taught summer courses in Venice and Paris. In 1996, he received Boston University’s highest teaching award, the Metcalf Prize. He is also an active pianist who gives regular lecture / performances on music in its cultural context. A
He lives in Portland, Maine with his wife Lydia Moland, who teaches philosophy at Colby College. To learn about his most recent activities and scholarship, visit his profile page on the website of the Department of History.