David Waldstreicher

Read poems by this poet

David Waldstreicher earned his BA in history and English literature from the University of Virginia and an MA and PhD in American studies from Yale University. 

Waldstreicher is author of The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023); Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (Hill & Wang, 2009); Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery and the American Revolution (Hill & Wang, 2004); and In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1997).

Waldstreicher has also edited numerous works, including Revolutions and Reconstructions: Black Politics in the Long Nineteenth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), coedited with Van Gosse; the Library of America edition of The Diaries of John Quincy Adams (2017); Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic (The University of North Carolina Press, 2004), coedited with Jeffrey L. Pasley and Andrew W. Robertson; and The Struggle Against Slavery: A History in Documents (Oxford University Press, 2001).

Waldstreicher’s scholarly articles and books have won prizes from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, the Southeastern American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and the American Jewish Historical Society. He is also the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the New York Public Library, the American Philosophical Society, and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

Waldstreicher is an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society. He has taught history at Temple University, the University of Notre Dame, Yale University, and Bennington College. Waldstreicher is currently is a distinguished professor at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY), where he has taught since 2014.