Joseph Fronczak

Title
Research Scholar, History
Office Phone
Office
227 Dickinson Hall
Office Hours
Tuesday: 10:30 am-12:30 pm
Bio/Description

Joseph Fronczak is a historian of the United States and the modern world, specializing in the history of politics and ideologies, the history of labor and capitalism, and transnational and global history.

A graduate of the University of Wisconsin, he received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 2014. The following year, he was a Mahindra postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University as part of the interdisciplinary Andrew H. Mellon Foundation Seminar on Violence and Non-violence. At Princeton, he has taught courses in global history and the history of U.S. foreign relations. He has also taught international history at Corpus Christi College, Oxford University. In the spring of 2016 he was a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, and in 2018-2019 he was a faculty fellow at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard.

Everything Is Possible: Antifascism and the Left in the Age of Fascism was published by Yale University Press in January 2023. The book explains how antifascism became a global political cause in the mid-1930s and explores how the antifascist left of these years helped shape today's political world. "The Fascist Game: Transnational Political Transmission and the Genesis of the U.S. Modern Right," Journal of American History (Dec. 2018), offers a reinterpretation of the origins of modern American conservatism. A conversation on the article is available online at the Organization of American Historians' website Process. "Local People's Global Politics: A Transnational History of the Hands Off Ethiopia Movement of 1935," which appeared in Diplomatic History in April 2015, received honorable mention for the 2016 Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) Stuart L. Bernath Scholarly Article Prize and was selected by Oxford University Press for its 2016 Must-Read Foreign Relations History List. "Gangster for Capitalism: Smedley Butler Abroad in the Age of Empire," a study of the role of coercion in the construction of twentieth-century liberal capitalism, was published in Capitalism and Diplomacy: The Political Economy of U.S. Foreign Relations in the Twentieth Century, edited by Christopher Dietrich (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022).

He has also written on the history of the national security state for In These Times and Jacobin.

Area of Interest
Economic History
Foreign Relations
Intellectual History
Labor History
Region
United States