Harvey Graff

Director of LiteraryStudies@OSU

Harvey J. Graff is Ohio Eminent Scholar in Literacy Studies and Professor of English and History at The Ohio State University. He directs the LiteracyStudies@OSU initiative, a university-wide interdisciplinary program, based at the Humanities Institute.  Among his books are The Literacy Myth: Literacy and Social Structure in the Nineteenth-Century City; The Legacies of Literacy: Continuities and Contradictions in Western Culture and Society; The Labyrinths of Literacy: Reflections on Literacy Past and Present; National Literacy Campaigns in Historical and Comparative Perspective; Conflicting Paths: Growing Up in America; The Dallas Myth: The Making and Unmaking of an American City. He has also written on family history, criminality; social structure and population; education; and methodology and theory in history, social science, and humanities. A new collection of essays, Literacy Myths, Legacies, and Lessons was published in 2011. He is currently at work on a social history of interdisciplinarity.