Profile
Jonathan Rosenberg is a professor of twentieth-century U.S. history at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His research focuses on the history of the United States in a global context.
Rosenberg’s current book project, The Jazz Expats: How American Jazz Musicians Left Their Country and Changed the World, is the story of an extraordinary group of American creators whose lives and art became intertwined with unfolding cultural and political developments in Europe. Whether in France, Scandinavia, or the Netherlands, these gifted Americans played a leading role on the European cultural scene from the end of World War I to the 1970s. Lending their distinctive sonic energy and unique personal style to urban life in Europe, the jazz expats contributed to one of the twentieth century’s most significant developments, the Americanization of the world.
Rosenberg’s other books include Dangerous Melodies: Classical Music in America from the Great War through the Cold War (W.W. Norton, 2020); How Far the Promised Land?: World Affairs and the American Civil Rights Movement from the First World War to Vietnam (Princeton University Press, 2006); as co-author, Kennedy, Johnson, and the Quest for Justice: The Civil Rights Tapes (W.W. Norton, 2003); and with John Lewis Gaddis, Ernest May, and Philip Gordon, he co-edited and contributed to Cold War Statesmen Confront the Bomb: Nuclear Diplomacy since 1945 (Oxford University Press, 1999).
Recent and forthcoming presentations on the intersection between music and world affairs include: “Unwitting Diplomats: The Jazz Expats and the Americanization of Europe,” Sciences Po, Aix-en-Provence, France, May 2025; “Americans in Paris: How America’s Expat Performers Captivated the French Capital in the 1920s,” Free University of Berlin, December 2024; “Composers, Maestros, and Pianists: Considerations on Classical Music in Postwar America” (keynote address), Annual Meeting of the German Association for American Studies, Oldenburg, Germany, May, 2024; “`A Sixteen-Inch Broadside of Soft Power’: The New York Philharmonic’s 2008 Trip to North Korea,” Turku, Finland, May, 2023. In recent years, Rosenberg has written on music and politics for the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal, and discussed the subject on C-Span, NPR, and various music podcasts.
Before receiving his PhD in history from Harvard University, Rosenberg, a graduate of Juilliard, worked as a musician.