Guy Ortolano is a prize-winning historian of Britain. After receiving his PhD from Northwestern in 2005, he taught at Wash U and Virginia, arriving to NYU in 2009. He has been the Astor Visiting Lecturer at Oxford and Visiting Professor of History at King’s College London. For five years he co-edited Twentieth Century British History, now Modern British History. His work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association, the Josephine de Karman Foundation, and the American Philosophical Society.

Ortolano has written about the history of science, urban history, and intellectual history. The Two Cultures Controversy recast a notorious debate about science and literature as a contest between rival forms of liberalism. Thatcher’s Progress examined Britain’s creation of thirty-two new towns after the Second World War, reading this ambitious program of urban development as evidence of the vitality of postwar social democracy. His current research, Supernational, asks how the seemingly insular tradition of national historical writing has dealt with scales and connections that far exceed the nation.

Ortolano teaches surveys of British and European history, as well as seminars on urban modernism, the Darwinian Revolution, and historical writing. He is developing a new graduate seminar, with Karl Appuhn, reading early modern and modern histories side-by-side. He has won multiple teaching prizes, including a Golden Dozen Award from NYU.

Raised in Stone Mountain, Georgia, Ortolano graduated from the University of Georgia, where he made his way to British and European history through courses by Kirk Willis. He now lives in New York City with his wife, Jenny Mann.