Christopher Loss is an historian of the twentieth-century United States who specializes in the social, political, and policy history of higher education. He holds a joint appointment in Peabody College and in Arts & Science. His interests range from the study of democratic citizenship and interdisciplinary expertise to the research economy and the linkages between the K–12 and higher education systems, focusing in each of these areas on the ways in which the organization of knowledge shapes—and is shaped by—political and social institutions in modern America.
His latest book is Robert’s Rules of Order, and Why It Matters for Colleges and Universities Today (Princeton University Press, 2021). He is also the author of Between Citizens and the State: The Politics of American Higher Education in the Twentieth Century (Princeton University Press, 2012), winner of the 2013 American Educational Research Association Outstanding Book Award; and co-editor of The Convergence of K-12 and Higher Education: Policies and Programs in a Changing Era (Harvard Education Press, 2016), a study of the interplay of the K–12 and higher education sectors and its implications for future policymaking, practice, and education research. His current book project, Front and Center: Academic Expertise and its Challengers in the Post–1945 United States, traces the rise of interdisciplinary centers and their impact on professional life and on university development more broadly since World War II. Loss has held fellowships at the Miller Center of Public Affairs, the Brookings Institution, and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. From 2010–12 he served on the Teagle Foundation’s National Forum on the Future of Liberal Education. In 2016 he was named a Chancellor Faculty Fellow at Vanderbilt University.
Loss has published articles and essays in the Journal of American History, Journal of Policy History, Social Science History, History of Education Quarterly, Journal of Military History, and Journal of Urban History, among others. He has organized and/or co-edited a number of special journal issues, most recently on the theme of Psychology, Politics, and Public Policy for the Journal of the History of Psychology. He has also written essays on current academic affairs for the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed, and is a regular commentator on education matters for a variety of media outlets.
Loss is an award-winning instructor. He teaches in the undergraduate HOD major and in LPO’s professional and doctoral programs. He is a former director of the M.Ed. program in Higher Education Administration and previously served on the Vanderbilt Faculty Senate.
Before arriving at Vanderbilt University, Loss was a research fellow in the Governance Studies Program at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. He also worked in academic administration for four years in the Office of the Vice President and Provost at the University of Virginia.