James Sparrow is a historian of modern US politics broadly construed, with special interests in the mutual constitution of social categories, democratic publics, and state formation. His first book, Warfare State (Oxford University Press, 2011), is a history of the social politics of the national state as its foundations shifted from welfare to warfare during World War II. He is currently completing a sequel to Warfare State tentatively titled Sovereign Discipline: The American Extraterritorial State in the Atomic Age. This book examines the mass politics of extraterritorial sovereignty, and the crisis of legitimacy it engendered, from V-E Day to the Cuban Missile Crisis. His third book project, an intellectual history titled New Leviathan: Rethinking Sovereignty and Political Agency after Total War, is also nearing completion. Much of this recent work is informed by a long-term collaborative research project on the problem of the democratic state supported by two Neubauer Collegium projects (The State as History and Theory and The Problem of the Democratic State in US History). The collaboration resulted in the edited collection Boundaries of the State in US History as well as two special issues of the Tocqueville Review.

To learn more about James Sparrow's research and publications, please visit his profile page at the Department of History.