Joseph Morgan Kousser (born October 7, 1943) is an American historian. He is a professor of history and social sciences at the California Institute of Technology.

Early life and education

Kousser was born on October 7, 1943, in Lewisburg, Tennessee. He graduated from Princeton University with an A.B. in history in 1965 after completing a senior thesis titled "Tennessee Politics and the Negro, 1948-1964." He then received a Ph.D. in political science from Yale University in 1971 after completing a 492-page long doctoral dissertation titled "The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910" under the supervision of C. Vann Woodward.

Career

Kousser joined the California Institute of Technology in 1971, where he is professor of history and social sciences. He was a visiting professor at Harvard University in 1981, and he was the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University from 1984 to 1985. One of Kousser's primary fields of expertise is the current and historical interaction of race and voting rights in the United States. He has served as an expert witness in over thirty-five federal or state voting rights cases, including Garza v. County of Los Angeles (1990), United States v. Memphis (1991), Shaw v. Hunt (1994), Cano v. Davis (2002) and Perry v. Perez (2012). Kousser was the editor of the journal Historical Methods from 2000 to 2013. He is the author of The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910 (1974), and Colorblind Injustice: Minority Voting Rights and the Undoing of the Second Reconstruction (1999).

Works