Princeton University History Department

Kevin M. Kruse studies the political, social, and urban/suburban history of 20th-century America, with particular interest in the making of modern conservatism. Focused on conflicts over race, rights, and religion, he also studies the postwar South and modern suburbia.

Professor Kruse is the author of White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (2005), as well as the co-editor of three collections: The New Suburban History (2006), with Thomas Sugrue; Spaces of the Modern City (2008), with Gyan Prakash; and Fog of War: The Second World War and the Civil Rights Movement (2012) with Stephen Tuck.  He is currently at work on a study of the making of the American religious nationalism in the mid-twentieth century, titled One Nation Under God: Corporations, Christianity and the Roots of the Religious Right.

His first book, White Flight, won prizes such as the 2007 Francis B. Simkins Award from the Southern Historical Association (for the best first book in Southern history, 2005-2006) and the 2007 Best Book Award in Urban Politics from the American Political Science Association.  In addition, Professor Kruse has been honored as one of America's top young "Innovators in the Arts and Sciences" by the Smithsonian Magazine and selected as one of the top young historians in the country by the History News Network.

He is a member of the Executive Committee of the Center for the Study of Religion and is affiliated with Princeton University’s Program in Law and Public Affairs.

Professor Kruse has taught undergraduate and graduate courses on twentieth-century U.S. history, race and racism in modern America, the role of religion in American politics, the rise of postwar suburbia, and transnational approaches to the Second World War and the Vietnam War.

• 1994 B.A., History, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
• 1997 M.A., History, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.
• 2000 Ph.D., History, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York.