Biography
Jonathan Gienapp is Associate Professor of History at Stanford University where he specializes in the constitutional, political, and intellectual history of the American Revolutionary era. His scholarship has focused primarily on the origins and early development of the U.S. Constitution. His first book, The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era (Harvard University Press Belknap, 2018), rethinks the conventional story of American constitutional creation by exploring how and why founding-era Americans’ understanding of their Constitution transformed in the earliest years of its existence. It investigates how early political debates over the Constitution’s meaning altered how Americans imagined the Constitution and its possibilities, showing how these changes created a distinct kind of constitutional culture, the consequences of which endure to this day. He is currently completing two other books. The first presents a comprehensive historical critique of the theory of constitutional originalism, arguing that recovering Founding-era constitutionalism on its own terms fundamentally challenges originalists’ unspoken assumptions about the U.S. Constitution. The second explores the intertwined history of popular sovereignty and nationhood in the early United States as told through the forgotten history of the Constitution’s Preamble by probing the often-entwined debates over popular rule, sovereignty, federalism, and constitutionalism in the nation’s earliest years to understand the full meanings of the Constitution’s opening words: “We the People of the United States.”
