Benjamin H. Irvin Named OAH Executive Editor

BLOOMINGTON, IN— The Organization of American Historians is pleased to announce that Benjamin H. Irvin, associate professor at the University of Arizona, has been named the new OAH Executive Editor and associate professor in the department of history at Indiana University, Bloomington. As OAH Executive Editor, Ben Irvin will oversee the publications of the organization including the Journal of American History, The American Historian, and Process—A Blog for American History.

Irvin is a social and cultural historian of British North America and the early United States and presently is associate professor of history at the University of Arizona. He also is a faculty affiliate of the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, the Institute for LGBT Studies, and the James E. Rogers College of Law. After completing his doctorate at Brandeis University in 2004, Irvin served for two years as the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His research primarily concerns the era of the American Revolution.  Irvin is the author of Clothed in Robes of Sovereignty: The Continental Congress and the People Out of Doors (2011). Irvin has worked on the editorial boards or staffs of Common-Place: The Journal of Early American Life, History Compass, and the Journal of American History. He is also a Distinguished Lecturer with the Organization of American Historians. He has been the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, including most recently the Emilia Galli Struppa Fellowship of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the Patrick Henry Writing Fellowship of the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience at Washington College.  Irvin was chosen after a nationwide search was conducted earlier this year.

Irvin replaces Edward T. Linenthal, who recently retired in July 2016 after serving as OAH Executive Editor since 2005. Irvin will begin his term as OAH Executive Editor in August 2017. He will be the 17th Executive Editor of the Journal of American History going back to its beginnings as the Mississippi Valley Historical Review in 1908.