About The Author
Christopher Grasso
Christopher Grasso is a historian of American culture, religion, and politics. His research and writing have focused on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He is the author of A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut (1999) and Skepticism and American Faith: From the Revolution to the Civil War (2018), which won the SHEAR Best Book Prize. He has published essays in journals including the William & Mary Quarterly, the Journal of the Early Republic, and the Journal of American History.
Grasso’s latest book is Teacher, Preacher, Soldier, Spy: The Civil Wars of John R. Kelso (Oxford University Press, 2021); he also edited part of Kelso’s Civil War memoir for Yale University Press as Bloody Engagements: John R. Kelso’s Civil War (2017).
Grasso is a professor of history at Brown University. He was previously the Pullen Professor of History at William & Mary. He earned his PhD from Yale in 1992, and also taught at St. Olaf College. He was Editor of the William & Mary Quarterly from 2000-2013.
Read more about his writings on Kelso here.
Photo credit: Beth Wood
Published Works
Teacher, Preacher, Soldier, Spy: The Civil Wars of John R. Kelso
Oxford University Press, 2021
Skepticism and American Faith: From the Revolution to the Civil War
Oxford University Press, 2018
Winner of the 2018 SHEAR Book Prize (Society for the History of the Early American Republic, best book in American history, 1776-1861, published in 2018.
Bloody Engagements: John R. Kelso’s Civil War
Yale University Press, 2017
Annotated edition of Kelso’s memoir. Winner of the 2018 A. M. Pate, Jr. Award in Civil War History for best book written on the Trans-Mississippi sector of the War.
A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, Virginia, 1999
Winner of the Homer D. Babbidge, Jr., Award, Association for the Study of Connecticut History