Professor Kendrick Oliver PhD, Fellow of Royal Historical Society
Professor of American History and Head of History Department
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Professor Kendrick Oliver is Professor of American History and Head of History Department at the University of Southampton.
I specialise in the history of the United States in the mid-twentieth century. In particularly, I am interested in exploring modern American political, social and cultural responses to some of the larger questions of human existence. This theme links my doctoral work on nuclear diplomacy with subsequent studies of memory and catastrophe, wartime atrocities, crime and punishment, religion, technology and space exploration, and with my current research into the social and cultural history of scientific cosmology in the United States.
I have written three books, including The My Lai Massacre in American History and Memory and To Touch the Face of God: the Sacred, the Profane and the American Space Program, 1957-75.
My current book project explores the social and cultural history of the ‘big bang' theory of the universe's origins. This project, contracted to University of Massachusetts Press, has received generous financial support from the American Philosophical Society, the American Institute of Physics and the Dibner History of Science Program at the Huntington Library. I have also recently completed a suite of four articles and chapters exploring the history of American evangelicals’ involvement with prison ministry at home and abroad.
In the mid-2000s, I helped to found Historians of the Twentieth Century United States and served as the organization’s chair between 2017 and 2020.
Qualifications
- BA (Hons), History, University of Reading 1992
- PhD, War Studies, University of London, 1995
Appointments
- Temporary Lecturer in American History, University of Newcastle, 1995
- Lecturer in American History, University of Southampton, 1996
- Senior Lecturer in American History, 2003
- Reader in American History, 2008
- Professor of American History, 2013