The American Historical Association (AHA) has appointed Alex Lichtenstein as editor of the American Historical Review (AHR), beginning August 2017. “Professor Lichtenstein brings energy and insight to the editorial direction of the American Historical Review,” AHA president Pat Manning said of the appointment. “The AHA Council looks forward to working with him, the journal staff, and [the AHR editorial] board in charting the future of the premier historical journal.”

Alex Lichtenstein is professor of history at Indiana University, where he teaches US and South African history. His research focuses on the intersection of labor history and the struggle for racial justice in modern societies shaped by white supremacy. His first book, Twice the Work of Free Labor (1996), examined the role of convict leasing and chain gangs in the remaking of the American South in the half century after the Civil War. His subsequent articles on prison history, US labor and civil rights activism, and South African trade unions have appeared in Labor, Journal of African History, Journal of American History, Journal of Southern African Studies, Journal of Peasant Studies, International Review of Social History, Working USA, South African Historical Journal, Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, and LA Review of Books. He served as associate editor of the AHR in 2014–15 and interim editor in 2015–16. Prior to that, he was an editor of Safundi: The Journal of South African & American Studies, and in 2014 he co-edited an issue of Radical History Review devoted to the history of the global anti-apartheid movement. His most recent book, with Rick Halpern, is Margaret Bourke-White and the Dawn of Apartheid (2016).

Professor Lichtenstein replaces Robert A. Schneider, who served as editor from 2005–15. Professor Schneider will be the interim editor during 2016–17. He will leave behind the most widely read and frequently cited peer-reviewed historical journal in the world.