I was born in Owensboro, Kentucky, in 1951, to Buford and Faye Rediker, the first of their two sons.  I come from a working-class family, with roots in the mines and factories of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia; I grew up in Nashville and Richmond.  I attended Vanderbilt University, dropped out of school and worked in a factory for three years, and graduated with a B.A. from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1976.  I went to the University of Pennsylvania for graduate study, earning an M.A. and Ph.D. in history.

I taught at Georgetown University from 1982 to 1994, lived in Moscow for a year (1984-5), and am currently Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History at the University of Pittsburgh.

I have, over the years, been active in a variety of social justice and peace movements, most recently in the worldwide campaign to abolish the death penalty.

I am, by ancestry, Welsh, Scottish, Dutch, and Cherokee; I am, by upbringing, a Southerner; I am, by generation, of the New Left; I am, by choice, a citizen of the world.

I have written, co-written, or edited six books: Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea  (1987); Who Built America? (1989), volume one; The Many-Headed Hydra (2000); Villains of All Nations  (2004); The Slave Ship: A Human History  (2007); and Many Middle Passages  (2007). I am currently working on a new history of the Amistad Rebellion.

It has been my good fortune to lecture throughout the United States and abroad, in Kolkata, Medellín, Moscow, Sydney, Tokyo, and Vienna; to have my writings translated into French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish; and to hold fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Andrew P. Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment of the Humanities. It has been my much greater good fortune to be married to Wendy Z. Goldman, a professor of Russian/Soviet history at Carnegie Mellon University. We have two children, Zeke and Eva, and a big, badly-behaved English Bulldog, Jellybean.

Curriculum Vitae of Marcus Rediker