Steven Mintz

Steven Mintz
Mintz at the 2015 Texas Book Festival
Born	1953 Detroit, Michigan
Occupation	Historian
Nationality	American

Steven Mintz (born 1953), is an American historian, Executive Director of the University of Texas System's Institute for Transformational Learning and a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. He has taught at Oberlin College, University of Houston, and Columbia University, where he directed the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Teaching Center. He has also held visiting appointments at Pepperdine University and the University of Siegen in Germany, been a visiting scholar at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University. and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.

In addition to a commitment to pedagogy, interests on which he has published widely include the history of the American family and children, film and history, immigration and ethnic history.

Born in Detroit, Michigan, he received his B.A. from Oberlin College (1973) and his M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. degrees from Yale University (1979). At Oberlin, where he wrote his senior thesis on the Harlem Renaissance novelist Jean Toomer, he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and graduated Senior Scholar in History. At Yale, he completed his dissertation, "Studies in the Victorian Family," under the direction of David Brion Davis. It was published as A Prison of Expectation: The Family in Victorian Culture in 1983.

After serving as a visiting assistant professor of History at Oberlin College (1978–1980), he joined the History Department at the University of Houston (1981–2007), where he was the John and Rebecca Moores Professor of History and Director of the American Cultures Program, which offers comparative perspectives on the peoples and cultures of the Western Hemisphere.