Bio

Since 2018 Jacob S. Dorman, Ph.D. has been Associate Professor of History at the University of Nevada, Reno, and also teaches in the university’s Core Humanities Program; before that he was a tenured professor at the University of Kansas.

Dorman is an award-winning historian and professor who was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area and whose experience in racially diverse public schools, as a musician, and as a fan of jazz and hip hop drove him to attempt to understand race and racism in all their forms. In light of the Crown Heights Riots of 1991 and the Los Angeles Riots of the following year, he gravitated towards cultural studies and loved the rigor and surprising ironic twists of archival historical research, which constantly demonstrated that the past was not as one might expect it to be.

At Stanford University he was strongly influenced by professors such as cultural studies maven Sylvia Wynter, Martin Luther King Papers editor Clayborne Carson, religious studies professor Arnold Eisen, and the late George Fredrickson, an authority on the history of racism. He  graduated summa cum laude with a degree in history in 1996.

After living in Washington D.C. and New York City, he earned a Ph.D. in U.S. History focusing on African American history at UCLA in 2004, under the guidance of Brenda Stevenson, and was fortunate to study with such stellar professors as Stevenson, Carlo Ginzburg, Lynn Hunt, Gary Nash, Henry Yu, Donald Cosentino, and the late Joyce Appleby. A onetime employee of both the Marcus Mosiah Garvey Papers at UCLA and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers at Stanford University, Dorman won the Andrew J. Mellon Fellowship at Wesleyan University and was an Assistant and then Associate Professor of History and American Studies at the University of Kansas from 2007 to 2017.

Dorman's scholarship has received fellowship support from many sources, including the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies, as well as the libraries or research institutes of Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Texas, Kansas, Wisconsin, and Duke.

He is the author of nine scholarly articles and book chapters, more than fifty conference presentations, and several op-eds. His 2013 Oxford University Press book won three book awards, including the prize for African and African Diaspora History from the American Historical Association, was tagged an "Outstanding Academic Title" by Choice magazine and named an Oxford University Press bestseller and reprinted in 2016.

As a professor, Dorman is committed to using humor, active learning, and various modalities including music and film to reach students and to undermine the elitist notion that education is supposed to sort the best from the rest. He instead concentrates on scaffolding skills throughout courses so that all students can thrive no matter how good or poor their previous academic training has been, since preparation is most often the residue of class background, not of intelligence or ability.

Students have rewarded his egalitarian approach with rave reviews: in a recent class, the most frequent student description of Dorman as a professor was "awesome," followed by "good," and "great." One student wrote: "You are a very kind and engaging teacher who cares about your students learning and being well-rounded informed individuals. Thank you for a great semester. You are a fantastic teacher, which is why I took another one of your classes...."