Professor Emeritus of History
Professor Capper sadly passed away in July 2021
Boston University’s obituary can be found here
American thought and culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
Charles Capper taught at the University of California, Davis and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill before coming to Boston University in 2001. His recent scholarship focuses on American intellectual life in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He is the author of Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life, Volume 1: The Private Years; and Volume 2: The Public Years (Oxford University Press, 1992, 2007). His edited works include Transient and Permanent: The Transcendentalist Movement and Its Contexts (Massachusetts Historical Society, 1999), and Margaret Fuller: Transatlantic Crossings in a Revolutionary Age (University of Wisconsin Press, 2007). He is also the coeditor of The American Intellectual Tradition, 2 vols., Seventh Edition (Oxford University Press, 2016) and the founding coeditor emeritus of the journal Modern Intellectual History published by Cambridge University Press. He is currently working on a book titled The Transcendental Moment: Liberal Transcendentalism and America’s Democratic Awakening.
Capper has received numerous awards, including the Bancroft Prize for the first volume of his biography of Margaret Fuller. He has been the recipient of Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Humanities Center, Charles Warren Center of Harvard University, American Council of Learned Societies, and other major fellowships. He is coeditor of Modern Intellectual History, and has served on many editorial, advisory, and colloquium boards.