Edward J Blum

Edward J. Blum (University of Kentucky, 2003) is a historian of race and religion in the United States. He is the author of Reforging the White Republic (2005), W. E. B. Du Bois, American Prophet (2007), and co-editor of Vale of Tears: New Essays on Religion and Reconstruction. For these works, Blum was awarded the Peter Seaborg Award in Civil War Studies, the C. Vann Woodward Dissertation Prize, and was nominated for the Frederick Douglass Prize, the Bancroft Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize (nonfiction and biography). He has been a fellow with the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University and with the National Endowment for the Humanities. In the classroom, Blum is interested in helping students engage the past in a variety of ways, whether through music and images or role-playing and historical simulations. His courses include Jacksonian America, the Civil War and Reconstruction, religion in the United States, and African American history. Currently, Blum is co-editing (with Paul Harvey) the Columbia Guide to American Religious History and writing a book on race and depictions of Jesus Christ in American culture, society, and politics, titled Jesus in Red, White, and Black.