Jim Cullen was born in Queens, New York in 1962, the son of a New York City firefighter and a homemaker; he has a younger sister. He grew up on Long Island, principally Northport, New York, where he attended public schools. Jim holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Tufts University, and a master’s and doctoral degree in American Studies from Brown. In addition to those schools, he has taught at Harvard, Fordham and Sarah Lawrence College.
Jim’s first book, The Civil War in Popular Culture, was based on his dissertation, and published by the Smithsonian Institution Press in 1995. Since then, he has published a dozen more (and edited two anthologies), which include Born in the USA: Bruce Springsteen and the American Tradition (HarperCollins, 1997) The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (Oxford University Press, 2003), Sensing the Past: Hollywood Stars and Historical Visions (Oxford, 2013), and the Kindle Single President Hanks (2011). Jim’s most recent book, Democratic Empire: The United States Since 1945, was published by Wiley in 2016. He currently has a book under contract with Rutgers University Press for “Those Were the Days: Why All in the Family Still Matters.” That project is slated for publication in 2020. Jim’s articles and reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, USA Today, the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, Rolling Stone, and the American Historical Review, among other publications.
Since 2001, Jim has taught history at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, specifically at its Fieldston campus in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. His specialty has been interdisciplinary work, where he has collaborated with colleagues in other departments to teach courses such as “Scientific America: A History of Technology in the United States” and “LP: 12 Albums that Changed the World.” Jim also helped launch an interdisciplinary senior seminar as well as a joint English/Ethics/History Humanities program currently taught by other colleagues. He has served as department chair as well as a term on the schools board of trustees.
Jim has been married to historian Lyde Cullen Sizer since 1989; they have four children currently at Fieldston, Sarah Lawrence, Colorado College, and NYU Law School. He lives in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. Jim is (alas) a Jets and Mets fan.
For more on Jim, see his featured profile on the Ethical Culture Fieldston School website.
Jim Cullen 