KU News Release

Jonathan Earle named interim director of KU’s Dole Institute

Jonathan Earle

LAWRENCE — American history scholar Jonathan Earle has been named interim director of the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas, Chancellor Robert Hemenway announced today.

Earle, associate director for programming at the institute, will step in for director Bill Lacy, who has taken an indefinite unpaid leave of absence to manage former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson’s exploratory presidential campaign committee. Thompson is expected to enter the race for Republican presidential nomination after Labor Day.

“In Jonathan, the Dole Institute is in exceptionally capable hands,” Hemenway said. “As a scholar and an award winning teacher, Jonathan has taken his classroom expertise to create engaging and entertaining programs at the institute. He is fulfilling Sen. Dole’s mission to attract young people to become involved in civic affairs.”

Earle, an associate professor of history who joined the Dole Institute staff in 2003 on a part-time basis, has just returned to KU after a year as a visiting chair in U.S. history at Occidental College in Los Angeles. During his absence, Steven Jacques served as the institute’s interim associate director. Jacques is now a senior advance leader on Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

As associate director, Earle has been responsible for coordinating public events and academic programs to engage KU students. Program topics he developed ranged from presidential politics and national security issues to doping in major league sports and the depiction of politics in movies and TV shows such as “The West Wing.” He also was instrumental in planning the Dole Lecture given by former President Bill Clinton in 2004.

Earle, who joined the KU faculty in 1997, is an expert on the early American republic and the period leading up to the Civil War and recently was named one of eight top young historians by the History News Network. He is the author of several books, including

“Major Problems in the Early American Republic” (Houghton-Mifflin, 2007) and “Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil” (UNC Press, 2004). He is working on a book on John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry and a book on the election of Abraham Lincoln.

He won the 2005 Broussard prize, given by the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, and was a co-winner of the 2005 Byron Caldwell Smith Book Prize for best book by a Kansas author, given by the Hall Center for the Humanities at KU. He also won a W.T. Kemper Fellowship for Excellence in Teaching in 2003.

Earle has a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University and master’s and doctoral degrees from Princeton University. At KU, Earle teaches a number of history classes. One of the most popular is Conspiracy Theories and Paranoia in American History.

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