James T. Fisher

James T. Fisher served as Professor of Theology and American Studies at Fordham. A historian of religion and culture in the 20th century U.S. and author of four books, Fisher received the American Catholic Historical Association’s Distinguished Achievement Award for Scholarship in 2014. Before joining the Fordham faculty in 2002, James Fisher taught American Studies at Yale and later held the Danforth Chair in Humanities at Saint Louis University.

Ph.D. History - Rutgers University. 1987

Cultural History of Religion and Ethnicity in the United States

Cultural and Social Histories of Cognitive Difference/Disability

Books

The Catholic Studies Reader, co-edited with Margaret McGuinness (Fordham University Press, 2011).
*
*History First Prize, Catholic Press Association Book Awards 2012

On the Irish Waterfront: The Crusader, the Movie, and the Soul of the Port of New York (Cornell University Press, 2009).

Communion of Immigrants: A History of Catholics in America (Oxford University Press, 2002; revised edition 2008).

Dr. America: The Lives of Thomas A. Dooley, 1927-1961 (The University of Massachusetts Press, 1997; paperback edition 1998).

The Catholic Counterculture in America, 1933-1962 (University of North Carolina Press, 1989).* *A Choice Outstanding Academic Book, 1990-91.

Selected Essays and Book Chapters

"The Year of Living Supernaturally," in Rethinking History 21:1 (Jan 2016), 28-47.

"On the Catholic Waterfront: Struggling for Power, Opportunity, and Justice," in Terry Golway, ed. Catholics in New York: Society, Culture and Politics 1808-1946 (Fordham University Press, 2008), 162-73.

"No Search No Subject? Autism and the American Conversion Narrative," in Mark Osteen, ed., Autism and Representation (Routledge, 2008), 51-64.

"Christopher Kauffman, the U.S. Catholic Historian, and the Future of American Catholic History," in U.S. Catholic Historian 24 (Spring 2006), 19-26.

"Catholics in the Middle Atlantic," in Randall Balmer and Mark Silk, eds., Religion and Public Life in the Mid-Atlantic Region: The Fount of Diversity (AltaMira Press, 2006), 71-94.

"American Religion Since 1945," in Jean-Christophe Agnew and Roy Rosenzweig, eds., A Companion to Post-1945 America (Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 44-63.

"All Catholicism is Local: Teaching American Catholic Studies," American Catholic Studies 112 (Spring-Winter 2001),73-80.

"'A World Made Safe for Diversity:' The Vietnam Lobby and the Politics of Pluralism, 1945-1963," in Christian G. Appy, ed., Cold War Constructions: The Political Culture of United States Imperialism, 1945-1966 (The University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), 217-237.

"Catholicism Ascendant: American Popular Culture in the 1950s," Culturefront 7 (Winter 1998-99), originally published in different form as "Alternative Sources of Catholic Intellectual Vitality," in U.S. Catholic Historian 13 (Winter 1995), 81-94.

"'The Great Beader:' Pete Axthelm and the Bonds of Tradition," in James T. Fisher, ed., Real Sports, Special Issue of South Atlantic Quarterly 95 (Spring 1996), 523-558.

"Clearing the Streets of the Catholic Lost Generation," in Thomas J. Ferraro, ed., Catholic Lives, Contemporary America (Duke University Press, 1997), 76-103 (published originally in South Atlantic Quarterly 93, Summer 1994).