Overview
James Chappel is the Gilhuly Family Associate Professor of History at Duke University. He works on the intellectual history of modern Europe and the United States, focusing on themes of religion, gender, and the family. He has published two books and published widely in both scholarly and non-scholarly sites (The New York Times, The Nation, and more). At Duke, he is committed above all to History undergraduates, especially majors, and to the pursuit of prison engagement opportunities. He is currently co-chair of the Prison Engagement Initiative at the Kenan Institute for Ethics, and founded the Duke-in-Prison lecture series.
His most recent book is called Golden Years: How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Age (Basic Books, 2024). It is a history of aging, health, and disability in the USA from 1920 to the present. It appeared in November 2024 and has been widely reviewed in outlets like The New Yorker and the Los Angeles Times.
His first book, Catholic Modern (Harvard, 2018), asks about the transformation of the Catholic Church in 20th century Europe. How did Catholics, long affiliated with monarchism and anti-Semitism, come to accept liberal democracy and capitalism? How, in a word, did Europe's Catholics become modern? The book argues that the major transformation took place in the 1930s and 40s. In those crucial years of violence and war, Catholics decided to stop trying to conquer society as a whole, and start trying to salvage "the family" as the source of moral authority and political order. The book thus explains how and why Catholics became buttresses of the postwar democratic order, and also explains the new centrality of gender and family ethics to Catholic life, thought, and policymaking.
His current research project concerns C.S. Lewis and the Second World War. This brings together previous interests in religion, war, and family.
For more information, visit his personal website.
Current Appointments & Affiliations
Recent Publications
Democracy, Capitalism, and the Welfare State: Debating Social Order in Postwar West Germany, 1949–1989. By Peter C. Caldwell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. viii+226. $90.00.
Journal Article The Journal of Modern History · December 1, 2021 Full text Cite“Explaining the Catholic Turn to Rights in the 1930s”
Chapter · September 24, 2020 This volume showcases the work of a new generation of scholars interested in the historical connection between religion and human rights in the twentieth century, offering a truly global perspective on the internal diversity, theological ... ... Cite“On the Border of Old Age”: An Entangled History of Eldercare in East Germany
Journal Article Central European History · June 2020 ABSTRACTHistorical research has turned in the last years more intensively toward entangled and transnational histories of biopolitics, the family, and the welfare state, but without renewed interest in aging and pension pol ... Full text Open Access CiteRecent Grants
Chappel NHC Fellowship
ResearchPrincipal Investigator · Awarded by National Humanities Center · 2019 - 2019View All Grants