Mark Philip Bradley Named Editor of American Historical Review

After a national search, the American Historical Association (AHA) has appointed Mark Philip Bradley as editor of the American Historical Review (AHR), beginning August 2021. AHR is regarded as the leading history journal in the world, ranked first of 100 journals in the 2019 impact ranking by Clarivate.

“I am delighted and honored to take on the editorship for what has been the journal of record in the historical profession since 1895. It is a welcome opportunity to play a leading role in reimagining how we do history in the twenty-first history and to elevate the diverse forms of practice that make up our discipline,” said Bradley.

Bradley was selected as editor by a search committee composed of AHA Vice President for Research Sophia Rosenfeld (chair), Paula Alonso, Sandra Elaine Greene, Joshua Piker, and Anand Yang.

“Bradley is an accomplished historian whose work ranges across geographical boundaries and draws on cross-disciplinary methodologies including critical race theory, queer theory, visual studies, and the digital humanities. He will meet the challenge of guiding the AHR in its mission to rethink the value of history today and for the future, while continuing to advance the journal’s goal of welcoming all historical fields and perspectives,” said AHA President Mary Lindemann.

“Bradley, a distinguished historian of twentieth-century U.S. international history, postcolonial Southeast Asia, and human rights, is also an experienced administrator who, we believe, will be an effective and innovative leader as the AHR's next editor,” the committee said in a statement. “We have great confidence in his ability to navigate the changing landscape of both historical scholarship and scholarly publication.”

Bradley, the Bernadotte E. Schmitt Distinguished Service Professor of International History and the College at the University of Chicago, also serves as Faculty Director of the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights and as Deputy Dean of the Division of the Social Sciences. He replaces Alex Lichtenstein, Professor in the Department of History at Indiana University, who served as AHR editor since 2017.

Bradley is the author of The World Reimagined: Americans and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 2016), Vietnam at War (Oxford, 2009), and Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial Vietnam (UNC, 2000), which won the Harry J. Benda Prize from the Association for Asian Studies. He is the coeditor of Familiar Made Strange: American Icons and Artifacts after the Transnational Turn (Cornell, 2015), Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars (Oxford, 2008), and Truth Claims: Representation and Human Rights (Rutgers, 2001). Bradley's work has appeared in the American Historical Review, Journal of American History, the Journal of World History, Diplomatic History, and Dissent. A recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Fulbright-Hays, Bradley is currently working on a history of the rise of global South and serves as the general editor for the four volume Cambridge History of America and the World. He has served as president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and is coeditor of the Cornell University Press book series, The United States in the World.

The American Historical Review is the official publication of the American Historical Association. The AHA was founded in 1884 and chartered by Congress in 1889 to serve the interests of the entire discipline of history. Aligning with the AHA’s mission, the AHR has been the journal of record for the historical discipline in the United States since 1895—one of the few journals in the world that brings together scholarship from every major field of historical study. The AHR is unparalleled in its efforts to choose articles that are new in content and interpretation and that make a significant contribution to historical knowledge. The journal also publishes approximately 1,000 reviews per year, surveying and assessing the most important contemporary historical scholarship in the discipline.

View this announcement on the AHA site here.