James T. Sparrow
· Associate Professor of History, the Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science, and the CollegeUniversity of Chicago · History of Science, Medicine, and Technology
Active 1970–2023
Academic metrics are sourced from OpenAlex and public funding records; values may differ from Google Scholar.
About
James T. Sparrow is an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago, affiliated with the Committee for the Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science and the College. His scholarly work focuses on the history of modern US politics, with particular interests in the mutual constitution of social categories, democratic publics, and state formation. Sparrow's first book, Warfare State, explores the social politics of the national state as its foundations shifted from welfare to warfare during World War II, examining how different groups of citizens engaged with the expanding warfare state and contested federal authority, thereby shaping political horizons for subsequent decades. He is completing a sequel titled Sovereign Discipline, which analyzes the mass politics of extraterritorial sovereignty from V-E Day to the Cuban Missile Crisis, and is also working on an intellectual history titled New Leviathan, which rethinks sovereignty and political agency after total war. Sparrow's research is informed by long-term collaborative projects on the democratic state, supported by grants and resulting in edited collections and special journal issues. His teaching spans graduate and undergraduate courses on US politics, diplomacy, war, social movements, citizenship, and digital history, including participation in Chicago's Core Curriculum.
Research topics
- Political Science
- Law
- Economics
- Political economy
- Physics
- Economy
- Law and economics
- Market economy
Selected publications
Boundaries of the State in US History
2015-01-01 · 30 citations
book1st authorCorrespondingLa 4eme de couverture indique : The question of how the American state defines its power has become central to a range of historical topics, from the founding of the Republic and the role of the educational system to the functions of agencies and America's place in the world. Yet conventional histories of the state have not reckoned adequately with the roots of an ever-expanding governmental power, assuming instead that the American state was historically and exceptionally weak relative to its E…
“Buying Our Boys Back”: The Mass Foundations of Fiscal Citizenship in World War II
Journal of Policy History · 2008-04-01 · 28 citations
article1st authorCorrespondingJust after 8:00 in the morning on Tuesday, September 21, 1943, the singer and radio star Kate Smith addressed her national audience with a personal story that set the tone for the marathon bond drive she would conduct over the next eighteen hours. In her usual self-effacing manner, she began by recounting the words of a man whose speech at a recent bond rally in Utica, New York, held special meaning for her audience: You know, friends, when we buy War Bonds, we're not buying tanks and guns and s…
2007-01-01 · 24 citations
book-chapterSenior authorToward a history of the democratic state
The Tocqueville Review/La revue Tocqueville · 2012-01-01 · 17 citations
articleSenior authorOver the past generation, the history of the state has been experiencing a much-noted renaissance, especially in France and the United States. In the United States as late as 1986, Morton Keller complained to William Leuchtenburg in the Journal of American History: “To say that ‘there is much still to be learned about the nature of the State in America’ is … a major understatement. There is close to everything to be learned about the State.” In France as late as 1990, Pierre Rosanvallon’s powerf…
Freedom to WantThe Federal Government and Politicized Consumption in World War II
Oxford University Press eBooks · 2012-02-01 · 11 citations
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract The growing capacities of a government preoccupied by the urgent need for mobilization provided an opportunity for those seeking full citizenship. A heightened wartime sense of national citizenship and responsibility—encouraged by the sudden surge of influence of the Army and Navy, as well as the new proliferation of power of federal agencies—enabled activists, in return, to demand new rights from the federal government. This would, in due course, lead to the so-called "rights revolutio…
Recent grants
NIH · $587k · 1989
NIH · $3.2M · 1991
Frequent coauthors
- 173 shared
Antonio M. Gotto
Cornell University
- 73 shared
Henry J. Pownall
- 63 shared
Karl H. Weisgraber
University of California, San Francisco
- 59 shared
Joel D. Morrisett
Baylor College of Medicine
- 57 shared
Louis C. Smith
University of California, San Francisco
- 47 shared
Robert J. Cushley
- 39 shared
Annett Rozek
Inimex Pharmaceuticals (Canada)
- 33 shared
Doris A. Sparrow
Baylor College of Medicine
Awards & honors
- Honorable mention, 2012 Frederick Jackson Turner Award, Orga…
Similar researchers at University of Chicago
- Resume-aware match score
- Save to shortlist
- AI-drafted outreach
See your match with James T. Sparrow
PhdFit ranks faculty by your research interests, methods, and publications — grounded in their actual work, not templates.
- Free to start
- No credit card
- 30-second signup