I am currently an associate professor of U.S. history at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. I teach a broad range of courses at both the undergraduate and graduate level. I specialize in U.S. foreign policy, the Vietnam War, the U.S. since World War II and the Sixties. My first book, Inventing Vietnam, is an analysis of the failed nation building effort undertaken by the United States in Vietnam and how that failure led to the war. In related research, I have also written on privatization of war and war profiteering, using the invasion of Iraq as a case study.
My more recent research focuses on the Sixties in the U.S. and specifically the counterculture and advent of rock music culture, with a particular emphasis on the role of the college campus. Based on that research, I published an article, “Campus Rock: Rock Music Culture on the College Campus during the Counterculture Sixties, 1967-8,” The Journal of Popular Music Studies 32, issue 3 (September 2020): 51-72.
Because the story was much more expansive and national in scope, I expanded this research while also highlighting two case studies: Stonybrook (Long Island, NY) and Drew Universities (Madison, NJ). The resulting book, Rockin’ in the Ivory Tower: Rock Music on Campus in the Sixties is scheduled for publication in Spring, 2023 with Rutgers University Press.
This project has also taken me into the realm of digital history/digital mapping. Thanks in part to a couple of Mellon Grants at Drew during the spring and summer 2019, I and three research assistants have created an extensive GIS mapping project of rock music during the late sixties–a link can be found in “links and things.”
Contact: jcarter1@drew.edu
