Thomas Bender is professor of humanities and history at New York University. At the University of California, Davis he was trained as an intellectual historian, and his work has focused on ideas and the institutions sustaining them, including institutions and ideas central to modern historiography and social theory, most evident in New York Intellect: Intellectual Life in New York City, from 1750 to the Beginnings of Our Own Time (1987) Intellect and Public Life (1992), Community and Social Change in America (1982), and his several writings on academic disciplines and universities. More recently, this in the spatial or geographical interest has shifted to the global dimensions of a an urban or national history most evident in Rethinking American History in a Global Age (2002) and A Nations Among Nations: America's Place in World History (2006). He sees these projects as pertinent to the public life and culture of the United States, and he writes for a variety of general audience publications, including the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, The Nation, Democracy, Dissent, and Harvard Design Magazine.