Dr Alan Taylor

Alan Taylor is a two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning historian of early America. A graduate of Colby College, he earned his doctorate in American History from Brandeis University and taught at Boston University, the University of California, Davis, and the University of Virginia, where he held the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Chair from 2014 to 2024. In 2016–2017 he served as the Harmsworth Professor at Queen’s College, Oxford.

Taylor is the author of twelve books on the American founding and its contested frontiers, including William Cooper’s Town (Bancroft, Beveridge, and Pulitzer Prizes), American Colonies, The Divided Ground, The Internal Enemy (Pulitzer Prize), American Revolutions, and American Republics (Zalaznick Book Prize). His twelfth book, Tower Hill: A Plantation on the Edge of Rebellion — on the world behind Nat Turner’s 1831 revolt — publishes this September. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and served as an advisor and interviewee for Ken Burns’s PBS film The American Revolution (2025).