John Stauffer is a professor of English, American studies, and African American studies at Harvard University. He writes and lectures on the Civil War era, antislavery, social protest movements, and photography. He is the co-editor, with Timothy Patrick McCarthy, of Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism (The New Press). He is also the author or editor of numerous other books and more than sixty articles, including two books that were briefly national bestsellers: Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (2008), which won the Iowa Author Award and a Boston Authors Club Award and has been translated into Mandarin, Arabic, and Korean; and State of Jones (2009), co-authored with Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins. His first book, The Black Hearts of Men (2002), won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize and Avery Craven Book Prize, and was the runner-up for the Lincoln Prize. His essays and reviews have appeared in Time, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, the New Republic, Raritan, and numerous scholarly journals and books. In 2009 Harvard named him the Walter Channing Cabot Fellow for “achievements and scholarly eminence in the fields of literature, history or art.”
He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife, Deborah Cunningham, and their two children, Erik and Nicholas.