Matthew Pratt Guterl is the L. Herbert Ballou University Professor of Africana Studies and American Studies at Brown University.
Born and raised in New Jersey, Guterl earned his BA degree from Richard Stockton University in 1993, and his PhD in History from Rutgers University in 1999. He has been awarded fellowships from the National Museum of American History, Yale University, Rice University, and the Library Company of Philadelphia, and was the 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 a Rutgers 250 Distinguished Alumni, a recipient of the Distinguished Alumni Award from Richard Stockton University, and an OAH Distinguished Lecturer.
Guterl is the author of Skinfolk, a memoir about growing up in a multi-racial adoptive family in the 1970s and 1980s.
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, and Seeing Race in Modern America. His most recent scholarly book is Josephine Baker and the Rainbow Tribe, which focuses on the cosmopolitan civil rights heroine’s late-in-life adoption of twelve children from around the world, who were raised in a castle in the rural French countryside and wielded as a weapon in the war against racism. 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.
His official Brown page – with a fuller academic biography and a CV – is right here.
MPG 