A native of Texas, Calder’s Bachelor of Arts degree is from the University of Texas at Austin where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1980. A scholar of the history of American consumerism, Calder’s 1999 book Financing the American Dream: A Cultural History of Consumer Credit was hailed by the Wall Street Journal as “deliciously seditious” for the ways it inverted common assumptions about the meaning of credit in American life. With a team of other distinguished scholars brought together by the Templeton Foundation and the Institute for the Advanced Study of American Culture at the University of Virginia, Calder is currently at work on a multidisciplinary, multivolume analysis of the thrift ethos in American history and culture.
An accomplished teacher, Calder is also a leader in the growing movement to bring scholarly modes of inquiry to teaching and learning in higher education. In 1999, Calder was chosen by the Carnegie Foundation to be a Fellow at the Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Calder’s research, published in the March 2006 issue of the Journal of American History, examines the problem of “coverage” in introductory courses and is part of a larger effort to forge a new “signature pedagogy” for the discipline of history. His work as a Carnegie Scholar has made him a popular speaker and presenter on topics related to historical thinking and the teaching of undergraduates.
Dr Calder lives in Rock Island with his wife Kathy and two children, Abigail and Andrew. If he was not a historian he would be a mountaineer or maybe one of those old guys playing checkers at the county courthouse.
Courtesy of Augustana College.