Steven Conn

Steven Conn is the W. E. Smith Professor of History at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Before joining the faculty at Miami he was a professor in the history department at Ohio State where he co-founded Origins and founded the Public History Initiative. He received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1994 after graduating from Yale University in 1987. 

Prof. Conn is a specialist in American cultural and intellectual history of the 19th and 20th centuries, urban history and public history. He is the author of 5 books and the editor of 2 more including most recently Americans Against the City: Anti-Urbanism in the 20th Century (Oxford UP, 2014) which was named a Top Ten book for 2015 by Planetizen. He is currently working on two book projects. The first is a history of American business schools which examines their contentious relationship to the rest of higher education; the second is a study of mid-20th century liberalism and the idea of "empathy" fostered by a number of writers, academics and others.

Prof. Conn has delivered talks all over the United States, at Kings College, Cambridge, Nanjing University, China, and Sydney, Australia. He has also taught courses on American history in Xi'an China and at the American Studies Center in Warsaw, Poland. Prof Conn has published dozens of essays in newspapers like the Columbus Dispatch, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, The Christian Science Monitor, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. He is a regular contributor to The Huffington Post and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Conn has been the recipient of grants from the American Philosophical Society, The Library Company, and the American Council of Learned Societies.