Guy Ortolano is a prize-winning historian and teacher. After receiving his PhD from Northwestern in 2005, he was an assistant professor at Wash U and Virginia, arriving to NYU in 2009. He has been the Astor Visiting Lecturer at Oxford and a Visiting Professor at King’s College London. His work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association, and the Josephine de Karman Foundation. He currently chairs NYU’s History Department.

Ortolano has written about the history of science, urban history, and intellectual history. His first book, The Two Cultures Controversy, recast a notorious public dispute about science and literature as a contest between rival forms of liberalism. His second book, Thatcher’s Progress, used urban history to illustrate the vitality of postwar social democracy. His current research, Supernational, asks how national historical writing has dealt with scales of reference and connection that exceed national frameworks.

For five years Ortolano co-edited Twentieth Century British History - and then, at the end of his term, lobbied for its rebranding as Modern British History. He spent a decade working with Susan Pedersen and Peter Mandler on the New York - Cambridge Training Collaboration (NYCTC). He introduced the early career workshop to the North American Conference on British Studies. Today, he directs NYU’s partnership with the Global Urban History Project, and also co-edits Cambridge University Press’s Modern British Histories book series.

Ortolano teaches surveys of British history since 1485, European history since 1750, and “deep time” in the British Isles, as well as seminars on urban modernism, the Darwinian revolution, and historical writing. He has won several teaching prizes, including NYU’s Golden Dozen Award, and has served on doctoral committees in English literature, Hebrew & Judaic Studies, French Studies, and Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies, in addition to African, Atlantic, US, and European history.

Raised in the shadow of Stone Mountain, Georgia, Ortolano graduated from the University of Georgia, where he made his way to British and European history via courses by Kirk Willis.