Rate My Professor Edward Larson

Edward J. Larson served as the Richard B. Russell Professor of American History and Talmadge Professor of Law at the University of Georgia, where he chaired the History Department and taught for over two decades. He earned a Ph.D. in the history of science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1984, a J.D. from Harvard University in 1979, an M.A. from the University of Wisconsin in 1976, and a B.A. from Williams College in 1974. Prior to his academic career, Larson practiced law in Seattle and served as counsel for the U.S. House of Representatives in Washington, D.C. At the University of Georgia, he received the 1992 Richard B. Russell Award for Undergraduate Teaching Excellence, the 1989 Parks-Heggoy Award for Excellence in Teaching History, and the 2001 Christ-Janer Award for Outstanding Research in the Humanities.

Larson's scholarship centers on the history of science, religion, and constitutional law, with a particular emphasis on the American creation-evolution controversy. His book Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate over Science and Religion (1997) won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize in History, the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel Award Finalist recognition, and the Washington State Governor's Writers Award. Other major works include Trial and Error: The American Controversy over Creation and Evolution (2003), Evolution's Workshop: God and Science on the Galapagos Islands (2001), A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America's First Presidential Campaign (2007), An Empire of Ice: Scott, Shackleton, and the Heroic Age of Antarctic Science (2011), The Return of George Washington: 1783-1789 (2014), a New York Times bestseller, Franklin & Washington: The Founding Partnership (2020), and American Inheritance: Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of a Nation, 1765-1795 (2023). He is the author or co-author of fourteen books and more than one hundred articles published in journals such as Nature, Science, Scientific American, and various law reviews. Larson has delivered lectures at over eighty American universities, held the Fulbright John Adams Chair in American Studies, served as a resident scholar at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center, participated in the National Science Foundation's Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, and delivered the 2000 George Sarton Lecture for the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Additional honors include the 1997 Templeton Prize for Outstanding Article in Science and Religion and an honorary doctorate in humane letters from Ohio State University.