Jack Greene

Jack Greene is Andrew W. Mellon Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University, where he taught from 1966 to 2005. In 1990-1992, he was a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Irvine, and he was an Invited Research Scholar at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University from 2000 to 2022. He has also been a visiting professor at the College of William and Mary, Oxford University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, University of Richmond, Michigan State University, and the Freie Universitat of Berlin, and has held fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the National Humanities Center, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, among others. In 1975-1976 Greene was the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University.

Greene’s best known work Pursuits of Happiness (1988) constructed a vastly influential new synthesis of colonial British American history and proposed a framework for a developmental narrative of early American history. Pursuits of Happiness is also known for challenging the ideas that the experience of New England was paradigmatic for the colonies as a whole and that its culture was the seedbed of American culture. Greene has been an advocate for comparative colonial studies across national boundaries since the late 1960s, when he founded the Program in Atlantic History and Culture at Johns Hopkins University, and participated in it for 20 years, establishing himself as a pioneer in Atlantic history many years before its emergence as the significant historiographic school of the past decades. Greene received the A.B. degree (1951) from the University of North Carolina, the M.A. (1952) from Indiana University, and the Ph.D. (1956) from Duke University, all in history. He was elected a Fellow (Class IV:2) of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2006.

Research interests:
Colonial History
American History
Atlantic History and Culture