Dr. Stephen Harp

Title: Distinguished Professor
Dept/Program: History and Modern Languages
Phone: 330-972-5468
Email: sharp@uakron.edu
Curriculum Vitae: Download in PDF format

Biography

A graduate of Indiana University, I have MA degrees in both History and French literature as well as a PhD in European history. After a first book on primary schooling and nation building in Alsace-Lorraine, I’ve studied mobilities, notably tourism. My book Marketing Michelin:  Advertising and Cultural Identity in Twentieth-Century France (Johns Hopkins, 2001) focused on the ways that Michelin tourist initiatives tapped into French constructions of national identity. Au Naturel: Naturism, Nudism, and Tourism in Twentieth-Century France (Louisiana State University Press, 2014) revealed the role of less well-known localities in permitting nudism as a means of fostering international tourism, as well as the veritable subculture of nudism that developed in twentieth-century France. Concerned that historians of tourism were neglecting its global context, I wrote A World History of Rubber: Empire, Industry, and the Everyday (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015) to track rubber, a critical commodity for touristic development, and the migrations and work of the people who produced it both in Southeast Asia and the West. I followed up with a focus on the workers who built tourist infrastructure and the environmental impact of that building in The Riviera, Exposed: An Ecohistory of Postwar Tourism and North African Labor (Cornell University Press, 2022).  

I regularly teach Humanities in the World since 1300, Nineteenth-Century Europe, Twentieth-Century Europe, France from Napoleon to de Gaulle, Global History, and graduate Historiography. I’m the faculty adviser of Phi Alpha Theta, the honor society and history club. I was a first-generation college student who worked my way through college; I feel a strong connection to UA students. When I am not working, I swim, do yoga, and hike far more frequently than should be legal.  

Education

Ph.D. - Indiana University