Biography
Bruce Kuklick was born in Philadelphia and attended its public schools. He was educated at the University of Pennsylvania, receiving a BA with a major in philosophy and a PhD in American Civilization. He also spent a year studying at Oxford University and another at the University of London on a Penfield Traveling Fellowship in Diplomacy. He taught at Yale from l968 to l972 and then at the University of Pennsylvania where he served as Nichols Professor of American History from 1996 to 2009, and where he is now Nichols Professor Emeritus. He instructed at the Open University in London in 1968; in l992 he visited the Netherlands as the Walt Whitman Professor of American Studies, and in 1996, 2010, 2011, and 2014 as Guest Professor in Leuven, Belgium; in 2005 as an Exchange Professor at University College, London; in 2008 he held the Fulbright Distinquished Research Chair at the Roosevelt Studies Center in the Netherlands, where he is an Honorary Roosevelt Fellow; and in 2016 he was a Fulbright Specialist at Radboud University.
Lisa Birnbach's College Book has recognized him as the best teacher at Penn, and he has received the History Department’s teaching prize -- the Richard Dunn Prize -- and all of the University’s major awards -- the Lindback and Abrams Prizes, and the Senior Class Award. The Teaching Company of Washington, D. C., has taped his lectures in its Superstar Teachers series. He has taught courses in American political, diplomatic, and intellectual history; and in the philosophy of history, and has lectured extensively on a wide range of subjects to both academic and general audiences.
The recipient of grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, Kuklick has also been a member of the Stanford University Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2004, he has consulted for various universities, philanthropic institutions, and governmental agencies; and he belongs to many scholarly professional associations including the Organization of American Historians, and the American Philosophical Association. He has chaired various committees awarding book prizes and grants.
He now chairs the Benjamin Franklin Grants Committee of the American Philosophical Society.
Kuklick is the author of a number of books, including his three-volume history of American thought Churchmen and Philosophers: Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey (l985); The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge Massachusetts, l860-l930 (l976); and Philosophy in America, 1720-2000 (2001). The second of these three won the Phi Beta Kappa book award in the humanities, while a symposium sponsored by the American Academy of Religion was held on Churchmen and Philosophers. The Rise of American Philosophy and Black Philosopher; White Academy (2008) have been the subjects of Author Meets Critics panels of the American Philosophical Association. His most popular and successful book is one on baseball history, To Every Thing a Season: Shibe Park and Urban Philadelphia (1991), which has won the Casey Award and the SABR-Macmillan Baseball Prize. It continues to be a small press best seller.
His most recent books are Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger (2006); a biography of African American philosopher William Fontaine, Black Philosopher; White Academy(2008; and a political history of the United States, One Nation Under God (2009), named an Academic Choice book of the year for 2010.
He has received two Mellon Foundation grants for a recently published book, written with Emmanuel Gerard, Death in the Congo: The Murder of Patrice Lumumba (Harvard University Press, 2015).
A new interest in Hollywood movies has led to his teaching film courses in 2016 and 2017 in Europe and at the University of Pennsylvania. His most recent book is The Fighting Sullivans: How Hollywood and the Military Make Heroes (Kansas University Press) about the deaths of the five Sullivan brothers in World War Two.
Kuklick is married and the father of four children. He lives in Philadelphia.
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