Thomas Bender

Thomas Bender is University Professor of the Humanities and Professor of History at New York University (NYU), where he joined the faculty in 1974. He became an emeritus 2016. At NYU, he also served as Director of the International Center for Advanced Studies from 1996-2007 and Dean for the Humanities from 1995-1998. Bender is an intellectual and cultural historian whose work focuses on the United States. His early work concentrated on ideas about cities and community, as well as the institutions and ideas that sustained the sciences, humanities, social sciences, and the arts. His more recent scholarship has addressed the transnational and global aspects of American history from the sixteenth century to the twentieth. His numerous books include New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City, from 1750 to the Beginnings of Our Own Time (Knopf, 1987), Intellect and Public Life (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), and The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea (New Press, 2002).  His most recent volume is A Nation Among Nations: America's Place in World History (Hill and Wang, 2006). Bender has served as Chair of the New York Council for the Humanities as well as a member of the board of The Municipal Arts Society of New York. He was elected a Fellow of the Academy in 1994, and served as the Academy’s delegate to the American Council of Learned Societies from 2008 to 2011.