Matthew Pratt Guterl is the L. Herbert Ballou University Professor of Africana Studies and American Studies at Brown University.
Born and raised in central New Jersey, Guterl earned his BA degree from Richard Stockton University in 1993, and his PhD in History from Rutgers University in 1999. He was winner of the 2010 Mary C. Turpie Prize, given by the American Studies Association, for distinguished teaching, service, and program development in that field. He is also Rutgers 250 Distinguished Alumni, a recipient of the Distinguished Alumni Award from Richard Stockton University, an OAH Distinguished Lecturer, and received the President’s Award for Excellence in Faculty Governance at Brown.
Guterl is the author of Skinfolk, a memoir about growing up in a multi-racial adoptive family in the 1970s and 1980s. You can learn more about that experience here. A particularly perceptive review is right here. Skinfolk was named one of the Best Books of 2023 by Kirkus Reviews. He would be glad to hear from readers.
As an award-winning historian, Guterl has also written The Color of Race in America, 1900-1940, American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation, Seeing Race in Modern America, and Josephine Baker and the Rainbow Tribe. Guterl has also also co-authored, with Caroline Levander, a book on the social meaning of the modern hotel, titled Hotel Life.
He is presently working on two books: a biography of the queer Irish human rights activist Roger Casement, and a history of racial deception – or “passing” – in American life since 1970. He has long term plans to write a book about the civil and human rights struggles in the United States and Northern Ireland, and another about Neverland Ranch.
His official Brown page – with a fuller academic biography and a CV – is right here.
MPG 