Jonathan Gienapp is Associate Professor of History and Law and the Nehal and Jenny Fan Raj Civics Faculty Fellow in Undergraduate Teaching. He specializes in the constitutional, political, legal, and intellectual history of the early United States. His primary focus to date has been the origins and development of the U.S. Constitution, in particular the ways in which Founding-era Americans understood and debated constitutionalism across the nation’s early decades. His historical interests intersect with modern legal debates over constitutional interpretation and theory, especially those centered on the theory of constitutional originalism.
He is the author of two books on American constitutional history and interpretation that have garnered wide acclaim.
His most recent book, Against Constitutional Originalism: A Historical Critique (Yale University Press, 2024), critiques the theory of constitutional originalism’s engagement with history. The book won the 2025 Order of the Coif Book Award from the Association of American Law Schools, was longlisted for the 2025 Cundill History Prize, and was named a History Today Book of the Year for 2024. It has been reviewed in several high-profile venues, including The Washington Post, which read: “What are the chances that, in 2024, a new book could fundamentally reorient how we understand America’s founding? Jonathan Gienapp . . . has written such a book. . . . You read it, and you get vertigo. . . . Gienapp’s book comes as a thunderclap. . . . this brilliant book is . . . the most forceful objection to originalism to date.”
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 the document’s 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. It won the 2017 Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize from Harvard University Press and the 2019 Best Book in American Political Thought Award from the American Political Science Association and was a finalist for the 2019 Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians. In addition, it was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2019 and a Spectator USA Book of the Year for 2018. It was reviewed in numerous places including The Nation.
His next book chronicles the forgotten history of the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution. Currently entitled “We the People of the United States: The Struggle over Popular Sovereignty and Nationhood,” it tells the story of the Preamble’s early vitality and eventual descent into political and legal irrelevance, 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.”
Gienapp has lectured across the country on the history of the nation’s founding and the U.S. Constitution. He is actively involved in deepening the public’s understanding of constitutional history through public-facing writing and interviews and extensive work with institutions such as the National Constitution Center and the United States Marine Corp. As a member of the Historians Council on the Constitution at the Brennan Center for Justice, he helps advise legal experts on the historical dimensions of constitutional issues before the Supreme Court of the United States. As part of this activity, he has contributed to several amicus briefs to the Supreme Court. He is also heavily involved in various initiatives to reinvigorate civics education in America.
Gienapp is also a celebrated teacher who has been awarded numerous accolades for his teaching and dedication to students. At Stanford, he has been awarded the university’s highest teaching award, the Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching, in addition to the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize and the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching in the School of Humanities and Sciences in the area of First Years of Teaching. Beyond Stanford, he has been awarded the Excellence in Teaching Award from the Phi Beta Kappa Northern California Association.
MORE INFO: https://www.jonathangienapp.com/