David Hollinger

In 2022 Hollinger published Christianity’s American Fate: How Religion Became More Conservative and Society More Secular (Princeton University Press). The most well known of his eight books are Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (1995), Science, Jews, and Secular Culture (1996), After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism and Modern American History (2013), and Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America (2017). He has edited or co-edited several other books, including The American Intellectual Tradition (seven editions, 1989 to 2016), co-edited with Charles Capper, Reappraising Oppenheimer (2005) co-edited with Cathryn Carson. And The Humanities and the Dynamics of Inclusion (2006).  One of his articles has become a standard treatment of the process of racialization and ethnoracial mixture, “Amalgamation and Hypodescent: The Question of Ethnoracial Mixture in the History of the United States,” American Historical Review, 2003.

Hollinger grew up in the Church of the Brethren, a denomination in which his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had been ministers, but Hollinger has identified himself as an atheist for most of his adult life. His family memoir, When This Mask of Flesh is Broken: The Story of an American Protestant Family (2017) is account of the Hollinger family’s history and its role in the Brethren community.

His influence in the field of religious history was featured in 2013 in The New York Times.

Hollinger served as president of the Organization of American Historians in 2010-11. He is an elected fellow of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has served as a trustee of the National Humanities Center and of the Institute For Advanced Study. is He is an elected member of the American Philosophical Society.

Since 1967 he has been married to legal scholar Joan Heifetz Hollinger. He is the father of two children.

Hollinger earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from La Verne College in 1963 his Master of Arts degree in 1965 and his Ph.D. in 1970, both from University of California, Berkeley. Before joining the Berkeley faculty himself in 1992, Hollinger taught at the University at Buffalo and the University of Michigan. He served as Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University in 2001-2. He retired at Berkeley in 2013.

David Albert Hollinger (born April 25, 1941 in Chicago, Illinois) is the Preston Hotchkis Professor of History, emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. His specialties are American intellectual history and American ethnoracial history.