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Charles L. Ponce de LeonAssociate Professor of History and American Studies |
Bio and Research Interests
Born and raised in Palo Alto, California, I received my BA from UC Santa Barbara, where I was a college journalist and worked in community radio. I went to graduate school at Rutgers University and received a Ph.D. in United States History. I have taught at Princeton University and Purchase College, a branch of the State University of New York. In 2008, I moved to CSULB, where I am now Associate Professor of History and American Studies.
I am a specialist in U.S. cultural and intellectual history. My fields of expertise include mass media and the popular culture industries, American intellectual life, and modern U.S. political culture. I have written books on the origins of celebrity in the U.S. and Elvis Presley and articles and review-essays on a variety of subjects. My forthcoming book, a history of television news in the U.S., will be published by the University of Chicago Press.
Education
Ph.D. Rutgers University
B.A. University of California, Santa Barbara
Selected Publications
Fortunate Son: The Life of Elvis Presley. New York: Hill and Wang, 2006.
Self-Exposure: Human-Interest Journalism and the Emergence of Celebrity in America, 1890-1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
“How Pivotal Were the Seventies?,” Reviews in American History 40 (March 2012): 128-138.
“Press and Politics,” in The Princeton Encyclopedia of American Political History. Michael Kazin, ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.
“The Man Nobody Knows: Charles A. Lindbergh and the Culture of Celebrity,” in Dominick A. Pisano, ed. The Airplane in American Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003: 75-104.
Courses
Visiting Scholar, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. 2010.
Leibnitz Summer Fellow, Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung, Potsdam. 2009.
American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship 2007-2008
German Marshall Fund of the United States Dissertation Fellowship 1999-2000
Fulbright Fellowship 1994-1995