Ari Kelman

A portrait of a man with glasses wearing a blue collared shirt

Professor of History

SSH 3208

Education

  • Ph.D., History, Brown University, 1998
  • M.A., History, Brown University, 1993
  • B.A., History, with distinction, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1991

About

Ari Kelman is a Chancellor’s Leadership Professor of History at UC Davis. He is the author, most recently, of Battle Lines: A Graphic History of the Civil War (Hill and Wang, 2015), as well as A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek (Harvard University Press, 2013), recipient of the Antoinette Forrester Downing Book Award, the Avery O. Craven Award, the Bancroft Prize, the Tom Watson Brown Book Award, and the Robert M. Utley Prize, and A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans (University of California Press, 2003), which won the Abbott Lowell Cummings Prize. Kelman’s essays and articles have appeared in Slate, The Christian Science Monitor, The Nation, The Times Literary Supplement, the Journal of Urban History, The Journal of American History, and many others.

Kelman has also contributed to outreach endeavors aimed at K-12 educators, and to a variety of public history projects, including documentary films for the History Channel and PBS’s American Experience series. He has received numerous grants and fellowships, most notably from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Huntington Library. He is now working on a book tentatively titled, For Liberty and Empire: How the Civil War Bled into the Indian Wars, editing the journal Reviews in American History, and serving as Associate Dean for Undergraduate Programs and Planning in the College of Letters and Science.

Teaching

Ari Kelman teaches a wide range of courses, including on the Civil War and Reconstruction, the politics of memory, environmental history, Native American history, and America in the 1960s.

Awards

  • UC Davis Graduate Studies Distinguished Graduate and Postdoctoral Mentoring Award, 2018.
  • Antoinette Forrester Downing Book Award, 2014. Presented by the Society of Architectural Historians for A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek.
  • Robert M. Utley Book Award, 2014. Presented by the Western History Association for A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek.
  • Tom Watson Brown Book Award, 2014. Presented by the Society of Civil War Historians for A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek.
  • Bancroft Prize, 2014. Presented by the Trustees of Columbia University for A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek.
  • Avery O. Craven Book Award, 2014. Presented by the Organization of American Historians for A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek.
  • UC Davis Distinguished Teaching Award, 2012.
  • “Top Young Historian,” History News Network, 2007.
  • National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship, 2004-2005.
  • Abbot Lowell Cummings Award, 2004. Presented by the Vernacular Architecture Forum for A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans.
  • Brown Brown University President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, 1995.