James G. Basker

James Basker came to Barnard College in 1987, having taught at Harvard University for seven years. He began teaching in the Columbia University graduate school in 1990 and for many years served as Chair of the Columbia Faculty Seminar on Eighteenth-Century European Culture. Since 1997, he has been President of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, a nonprofit organization that supports history and civics education in k-12 schools nationwide. He has also led summer schools and teacher seminars in Oxford for more than thirty years, currently as Director of “Oxford Academia,” based in University College and Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

Professor Basker is a specialist in the Enlightenment whose interests span the fields of history and literature, including the Black Atlantic, slavery and abolition, the life and works of Samuel Johnson, print culture, and women writers. His publications include He Has Long Outlived His Century (1984, with Hugh Amory, winner of the 1986 Leab Award for Exhibition Catalogs), Tobias Smollett, Critic and Journalist (1988, winner of a 1989 Choice Award); Tradition in Transition: Women Writers, Marginal Texts, and the Eighteenth-Century Canon, ed. with Alvaro Ribeiro, S.J. (1996); Samuel Johnson in the Mind of Thomas Jefferson (1999); a modern edition of The Critical Review, or Annals of Literature 1756-1763 (2002); Amazing Grace: An Anthology of Poems about Slavery 1660-1810 (2002); American Antislavery Writings: Colonial Beginnings to Emancipation (2012); a scholarly edition of Tobias Smollett’s The Adventures of Roderick Random (2012); and Black Writers of the Founding Era (2023). In 2025, he co-curated a panel exhibition, “Declaration 1776: The Big Bang of Modern Democracy,” which has been issued in multiple copies and is touring k-12 schools nationwide.

A former Rhodes Scholar and recipient of NEH grants, he has been awarded fellowships at the American Antiquarian Society, Yale University, and Cambridge University. He has served on the Editorial Board of The Age of Johnson and as a fellow of the Pierpont Morgan Library. He is an elected member of the Society of American Historians and serves on the Boards of the Association of American Rhodes Scholars, the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, the Frederick Douglass Prize, and Marymount School in New York. He is currently working on a book provisionally titled “Samuel Johnson, Abolitionist: The Story Boswell Never Told,” and editing a volume of African American writings from the period 1800-1845.