Jonathan Gienapp

Jonathan Gienapp is Associate Professor of History and Law and the Nehal and Jenny Fan Raj Civics Faculty Fellow in Undergraduate Teaching at Stanford University. He specializes in the constitutional, political, legal, and intellectual history of the early United States. His primary focus to date has been the origins and development of the U.S. Constitution, in particular the ways in which Founding-era Americans understood and debated constitutionalism across the nation’s early decades. His historical interests intersect with modern legal debates over constitutional interpretation and theory, especially those centered on the theory of constitutional originalism.

His first book, The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era (Harvard University Press, Belknap, 2018), rethinks the conventional story of American constitutional creation by exploring how and why founding-era Americans’ understanding of their Constitution transformed in the earliest years of the document’s existence. It won the 2017 Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize from Harvard University Press and the 2019 Best Book in American Political Thought Award from the American Political Science Association. His second book, Against Constitutional Originalism: A Historical Critique (Yale University Press, 2024), critiques originalism’s engagement with history. It argues that recovering Founding-era constitutionalism on its own terms fundamentally challenges originalists’ unspoken assumptions about the U.S. Constitution and its original meaning and thereby the foundation of the theory itself.

Gienapp’s next book is on the forgotten history of the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution, currently entitled “We the People of the United States: The Struggle over Popular Sovereignty and Nationhood.” It tells the story of the Preamble’s early vitality and eventual descent into political and legal irrelevance as a way of exploring the broader struggle over popular sovereignty and national union in the early United States.

In addition to these, Gienapp has published a range of articles, book chapters, and essays on early American constitutionalism, politics, and intellectual history, modern constitutional interpretation, and the study of the history of ideas. Gienapp has lectured widely on the U.S. Constitution and the American Founding era. He has been showcased in several National Constitution Center town halls and has been interviewed on the history of U.S. constitutionalism and politics in The New York Times and on NPR. He is also a member of the Stanford Civics Initiative and a charter member of the Alliance for Civics in the Academy.

Research interests:
History of the Early United States
Constitutional Interpretation and Theory
Origins and Development of the U.S. Constitution