Gerstle taught at
Catholic University of America and
Princeton University, before moving to the
University of Maryland, where he was Director of the Center for Historical Studies (2000–2003) and Chair of the Department of History (2003–2006). He joined the Department of History faculty at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee in 2006. In the 2012/2013 academic year, he was the
Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at the
University of Oxford. From 2014 to 2024, Gerstle was the
Paul Mellon Professor of American History at the
University of Cambridge. In 2026, Gerstle will hold the Kluge Professorship of American Law and Governance at the Library of Congress. Gerstle is one of the United States' leading historians of race, citizenship, and American nationhood. A historian of the twentieth-century United States, he is particularly interested in three major areas of inquiry: 1) immigration, race, and nationality; 2) the significance of class in social and political life; and 3) social movements, popular politics, and the state. Gerstle is the author, co-author, or co-editor of six books and the author of more than thirty articles on these topics. Gerstle served as the Annenberg Visiting Professor at the
University of Pennsylvania and as a visiting professor at the
School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (École des hautes études en sciences sociales aka EHESS) in Paris. In addition to France, he has lectured throughout the United States and in Canada, England, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Brazil, Japan, and South Africa. Gerstle has also lectured widely to the general public, and is often consulted by newspaper reporters, magazine writers, and television producers on matters pertinent to his areas of historical expertise. In May 2007, Gerstle testified on questions of immigration before the Immigration Subcommittee of the
House Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill. He has served on the editorial board of the
Journal of American History and the Board of Editors of the
American Historical Review. He is a member of the Editorial Board for
Past & Present. ==Honors==