Peter A. Shulman

Associate Provost for Curriculum
Office of the Provost
Elizabeth and Raymond Armington Professor and Associate Professor of History
Department of History
College of Arts and Sciences

As Associate Provost for Curriculum, Prof. Shulman is responsible for all aspects of the undergraduate curriculum that transcend the individual schools and College. This includes overseeing the operations of the Unified General Education Requirements (UGER), administration of Pre-Major Advising, and the Explore program. He also reviews all undergraduate course action and program action proposals and, in collaboration with the Faculty Senate and other university offices, works on undergraduate advising, program assessment, curricular partnerships, undergraduate curricular policies, and enrollment analysis, as well as collaborating with faculty on program-specific issues. His office also organizes the annual undergraduate awards ceremonies and the student-chosen Wittke and Jackson awards for undergraduate teaching and mentoring.

Before beginning as Associate Provost for Curriculum in 2023, he served in a series of leadership roles in CWRU's Faculty Senate, including as Senate Chair and Chair of the Faculty Senate Committee on Undergraduate Education (FSCUE).

As a historian, he studies science, technology, and American politics in the 19th and 20th centuries, with special interests in the history of energy, environmental history, communication and transportation, the history of American foreign relations, and the histories of genetics, biology, and intelligence. He teaches courses in the history of technology, energy and the environment, historical methods, and contemporary American history. His first book, Coal and Empire: The Birth of Energy Security in Industrial America, explored how American came to think about energy in terms of national security through the geopolitics, science, and engineering of coal in the 19th and early 20th centuries. His current book project is a history of how the developing science of genetics shaped debates about human identity between 1970 and 2000.

Shulman earned two degrees from MIT: an SB in Mathematics in 2001 and a PhD. in the History of Science and Technology in 2007. After a Mellon postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins University, he joined the CWRU faculty in 2008.

Shulman oversees the undergraduate curriculum beyond individual schools and the College, including the Unified General Education Requirements (UGER), Pre-Major Advising, and the Explore program. He reviews course proposals, collaborates on advising, program assessment, curricular policies, and enrollment analysis, and organizes the annual undergraduate awards ceremonies, including the Wittke and Jackson awards.

Teaching Information

Courses Taught

The History of Now: The U.S. Since 1980
Technology in America
Books as Bombs: Books that Transformed America
North American Environmental History
Issues and Methods in History

Publications

  • [current project] The Social Meaning of Genes: Modern Biology and the Politics of Who We Are, 1970-2000
  • “Technology and American Foreign Relations in the Nineteenth Century,” Cambridge History of America in the World, vol. 2 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022)
  • What Infrastructure Really Means: Making sense of current fights over a word we borrowed from the French long ago,” TheAtlantic.com, July 13, 2021
  • “Connection and Disruption: American Industrialization and the World, 1865-1917,” Companion to U.S. Foreign Relations, Colonial Era to the Present, ed. Christopher R.W. Dietrich (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2020), 252-270
  • Coal and Empire: The Birth of Energy Security in Industrial America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015)
  • “Ben Franklin’s Ghost: Social Reform and the Transatlantic Politics of Information, 1845-1860,” Journal of Global History 10, no. 2 (July 2015): 212-234.
  • “The Making of a Tax Break: The Oil Depletion Allowance, Scientific Taxation, and Natural Resources Policy in the Early 20th Century,” Journal of Policy History 23, no. 3 (Summer 2011).

Education

Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship
Johns Hopkins University
2008
PhD
History and Social Study of Science and Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2007
Bachelor of Science
Mathematics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2001

Additional Information