Harvey J. Graff (born June 19, 1949) is a comparative social and cultural historian of North America and Western Europe
He is a professor emeritus of English and History and Ohio Eminent Scholar in Literacy Studies at Ohio State University. Graff's scholarship spans multiple areas, including the history of literacy; childhood, youth and family; urban history; interdisciplinarity; and higher education.
His work on the history and social contexts of literacy has been published in multiple languages and countries. He is also known internationally for his contributions across several academic fields, particularly in the development of interdisciplinary approaches to historical and social analysis.
Education Harvey J. Graff received the Bachelor of Arts degree in history and sociology from Northwestern University in 1970 followed by Master of Arts from The University of Toronto in 1971, and his Doctor of Philosophy both in history and history of education, also from The University of Toronto in 1975.
He was a Woodrow Wilson and Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation fellow.
Personal life Harvey J. Graff was born to Milton and Ruthe Graff and grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is married to Vicki L. W. Graff.
Academic career Graff began his academic teaching career in 1973 as an Instructor in the Summer School at Northwestern University, shortly after completing his doctoral coursework.
From 1974 to 1975, he served as an Extramural Lecturer at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto.https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/books/graff/life.pdf
My Life With Literacy The Continuing Education of a Historian
In 1975, Graff became a founding faculty member of the University of Texas at Dallas, where he spent more than two decades in the School of Arts and Humanities, rising from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor (with tenure) and Full Professor of History and Humanities.
During this period, he played a role in mentoring doctoral students and securing numerous research grants, including support from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Spencer Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Science Foundation. During his tenure at UT Dallas from 1975 to 1998, he was also active in supervising doctoral students and securing multiple internal and external research grants. He was active in public history and public humanities. He founded the Dallas Social History Group in 1981.https://scholarworks.sfasu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1401&context=ethj
The "New" Social History and the Southwest: the Dallas Social History Project
Graff also held appointments during this period as Visiting Adjunct Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago in 1980 and Visiting Professor of English and Education at Simon Fraser University, Canada, in the summers of 1981 and 1982.
In 1998, Graff was appointed professor of history at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), where he also served as director of the Division of Behavioral and Cultural Sciences from 1998 to 1999. His interdisciplinary role extended across UTSA's doctoral and graduate programs, including the Ph.D. Program in Culture, Literacy, and Language, the Department of English, and the graduate faculty in Public Administration. His time at UTSA was marked by faculty development awards and research leave, as well as growing national leadership in interdisciplinary scholarship.
In 1999, Graff was elected president of the Social Science History Association (SSHA) for its 25th anniversary year of 2000, following his term as vice president in 1998.
In his presidential address Graff argued that traditional historians had successfully counterattacked against quantification and the innovations of the "new social history":
In 2001, in recognition of his contributions to historical scholarship and the interdisciplinary field of literacy studies, Graff was awarded the Doctor of Philosophy honoris causa by Linköping University in Sweden.
In 2004, Graff was appointed the inaugural Ohio Eminent Scholar in Literacy Studies and Professor of English and History at The Ohio State University. The Eminent Scholar appointment is the university's highest faculty recognition. It is endowed by the state to support distinguished scholars who advance cross-disciplinary innovation. At Ohio State, Graff held faculty positions in the Departments of English and History and cultivated affiliations with the Department of Comparative Studies and several university-wide research centers and interdisciplinary initiatives. His affiliations included the Diversity and Identity Studies Collective (DISCO), the Humanities Institute, the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, the Mershon Center for International Security Studies, the International Poverty Solutions Collaborative, Project Narrative, Popular Culture Studies, the Neighborhood Institute, and the Future of the University Group.
Graff's institutional contribution at Ohio State was the founding of LiteracyStudies@OSU in 2005, an interdisciplinary initiative that he directed until 2016.
LiteracyStudies@OSU facilitated collaborative research, curricular development, and public programming, helping to define literacy studies as a dynamic interdisciplinary field.
After retiring from active teaching in 2017, Graff was named Professor Emeritus of English and History.
Post-Retirement Work Following his retirement, Graff remains active in public education, extending his teaching and scholarly engagement beyond the university.
He continues to mentor former doctoral students and advise junior faculty on research, publication, and professional development. His post-retirement work includes virtual lectures, scholarly forums, and ongoing collaborations with students and colleagues in the United States and internationally.
From 2021 to 2024, he was the author of a regular column, “Busting Myths,” in the Columbus Free Press, where he applied historical and interdisciplinary analysis to contemporary issues, including higher education, urban development, and misinformation. He contributes essays to outlets such as Inside Higher Ed and Times Higher Education, where he writes on topics including interdisciplinarity, public engagement, and academic freedom.
He also participates in educational outreach at multiple levels, engaging with high school and undergraduate students on research topics such as critical race theory and urban history and politics. In 2022, he delivered a virtual faculty development lecture on interdisciplinarity to Zayed University in the United Arab Emirates.
His public education activities form part of a broader post-retirement initiative he describes as “Harvey U,” a non-traditional, global educational effort.
In 2022, he was named Academy Professor in the Ohio State University Emeritus Academy. In 2023, he was elected to full membership in the American Antiquarian Society and nominated to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Academy of Education.
In 2024, Graff published his hybrid autobiography, My Life With Literacy: The Continuing Education of a Historian. The Intersections of the Personal, the Political, the Academic, and Place (WAC Clearinghouse Publications and University of Colorado Press).
His new book is Reconstructing the "Uni-versity": From the Ashes of the " Mega- and Multi-versity" to the Futures of Higher Education " (Bloomsbury Academic).
Areas of research
History of Literacy Graff is known as a founding figure in the historical study of literacy and the New Literacy Studies. His work has fundamentally shaped how scholars understand the role of literacy in social development, cultural change, and historical interpretation. Through pioneering books, essays, and collaborative projects, Graff helped to establish literacy as a subject of rigorous historical inquiry. His landmark book The Literacy Myth: Literacy and Social Structure in the Nineteenth-Century City (1979; revised editions 1991, 2023) challenged the longstanding assumption that literacy automatically correlates with economic advancement or social mobility. In this and subsequent publications, such as The Legacies of Literacy (1987) and The Labyrinths of Literacy (1987/1995), Graff demonstrated that the meanings and functions of literacy vary significantly across time, place, and social context.
History of Children, Youth, and Family Graff is known as a pioneering figure in the interdisciplinary field of the history of children, youth, and family. His scholarship emphasizes the historically contingent and socially constructed nature of childhood and adolescence, challenging universalized or ahistorical understandings of growing up. A foundational work in this area is his widely cited article, "Interdisciplinary Explorations in the History of Children, Adolescents, and Youth—For the Past, Present, and Future", published in The Journal of American History (1999). In this influential essay, Graff explores the emergence of childhood and youth as subjects of historical inquiry, calling for greater interdisciplinary collaboration across history, sociology, education, and cultural studies. He argues for moving beyond sentimental or developmental narratives and toward historically grounded analyses that center class, gender, race, and place.
His book Conflicting Paths: Growing Up in America (Harvard University Press, 1995), which received the Choice Outstanding Academic Book Award, remains a touchstone in the field. Graff also edited Growing Up in America: Historical Experiences (1987), one of the earliest collections to examine childhood across diverse American contexts. These and other works trace how cultural expectations and institutional structures have shaped the experiences of children and adolescents across time.
History of cities and urban history Graff has played a role in the evolution of urban history, particularly within the broader frameworks of social, cultural, comparative, and interdisciplinary historiography.
Graff's urban scholarship reflects a commitment to studying cities as dynamic sites of social structure, inequality, identity, and historical memory.
His early urban work includes Dallas, Texas: A Guide to the Sources of Its Social History (1981), co-authored with doctoral students Alan Baron and Charles Barton, which was among the first efforts to document the social historical record of a modern American city using interdisciplinary research methods.
Graff’s most well-known urban study is The Dallas Myth: The Making and Unmaking of an American City (University of Minnesota Press, 2008). A critical and innovative history, the book challenges boosterist narratives and popular myths about Dallas, revealing the constructed nature of civic identity and historical memory. It is also a reflective experiment in urban historiography, combining empirical research with first-person commentary, placing Graff both as historian and urban subject.
In such book as Looking Backward and Looking Forward: Perspectives on Social Science History (co-edited with Leslie Page Moch and Philip McMichael, 2005), and in Undisciplining Knowledge: Interdisciplinarity in the Twentieth Century (2015), Graff situates urban history within a larger story of disciplinary transformation, arguing for historically informed, cross-disciplinary research to understand the complexities of urban life.
History of Interdisciplinarity, history of knowledge Harvey J. Graff is widely recognized for his pioneering scholarship on interdisciplinarity and the intellectual history of academic knowledge.
His 2015 book, Undisciplining Knowledge: Interdisciplinarity in the Twentieth Century (Johns Hopkins University Press), is a landmark work that offers the first sustained, comparative, and critical history of interdisciplinary initiatives within the modern university.