Writing the Revolution: New Histories by Harvard Alumni ft. Chapin, Pearsall, Perl-Rosenthal

Chloe Chapin
Fashion Historian
Harvard University
"Costuming the Nation"
Recent Book

Chloe Chapin is a costume designer and fashion historian. She has a PhD in American Studies from Harvard University, and master’s degrees in history (Harvard), Fashion & Textile Studies (FIT), and costume design (Yale School of Drama). A former Broadway costumer, Chapin took her designer’s eye into the historical archives in order to better understand both the history of men's suits and their impact on the modern world. In her new book, Suitable: the Sartorial Revolution and the Fashioning of Modern Men (Oxford University Press, 2026) Chapin tells the surprising story of how America’s Founding Fathers influenced not only politics and government, but also the next 250 years of men's fashion. Drawing on a wealth of visual, material, and archival sources, Chapin traces the development of suits from the American Revolution through the Civil War, exploring their impact on American identity and showing how suits became a symbol that transformed ideas of masculinity. Chloe serves as the Assistant Director for course development at the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning.
 

Sarah M.S. Pearsall
Professor and Department Chair
Department of History
Johns Hopkins University
Recent Book

Sarah M. S. Pearsall is Professor and Chair of History at Johns Hopkins University; she previously taught for nearly a decade at Cambridge University. She is a historian of early modern North America. Her fourth book, Freedom Round the Globe: A World History of the American Revolution, came out with Knopf Doubleday (U.S.), Picador (U.K.), and Rowohlt Berlin (Germany) in 2026.  
 

Nathan Perl-Rosenthal
Directeur de recherche, CNRS (France)
Senior Research Fellow, Center for European Studies, Harvard University
"The Long American Revolution on the Fourth of July"
Recent Book

Nathan Perl-Rosenthal is Directeur de recherche at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) and a senior research fellow at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (CES) here at Harvard.  He earned his A.B. from Harvard, in History, and his Ph.D. in history from Columbia.  He is the author of three books: Citizen Sailors; The Age of Revolutions and the Generations Who Made It; and most recently The Long Revolution: Creating a United States after 1776. The Age of Revolutions is the subject of two forthcoming forums, in Historia Mexicana and the Journal of Early American History, and his books have been widely reviewed, including in the Wall Street Journal and The New Yorker. 

Perl-Rosenthal’s research focuses on the age of Atlantic revolutions and global maritime history from a wide variety of angles.  He has published articles on law in and around the sea, on the development of concepts in nationality law, on letter-writing and political organizing—and, most recently, on the uses of “scale” in studying the American Revolution—an essay that appeared in the American Historical Review’s June issue for the semisequicentennial of U.S. independence.  He is currently working on a longue durée history of maritime prize-taking and the making and remaking of European seagoing empire from circa 1600 through the early twentieth century.

At Harvard, Perl-Rosenthal co-chairs the History Seminar at CES and is organizing a new federative seminar series, the Marc Bloch Seminars in Comparative History.

This event is provided by the Harvard in 1776 Initiative and is a component of the monthly Department of History seminar. This event is open to the public with a reception to follow in the Robinson Hall Great Space (foyer).