Professor Ambar's forthcoming book, Stars and Shadows: The Politics of Interracial Friendship from Jefferson to Obama, explores the role public friendships across racial lines have played in shaping American democracy. His narrative weaves the story of how friendship's performance throughout America's history has expanded the boundaries of who could be considered an intimate, a citizen, and ultimately, an equal. His recent book, Reconsidering American Political Thought: A New Identity (Routledge 2019), fills in the missing spaces left by traditional textbooks on American political thought, using race, gender, and ethnicity as a lens through which to engage ongoing debates on American values and intellectual traditions. American Cicero: Mario Cuomo and the Defense of American Liberalism (Oxford University Press 2017) explores the political career of former New York Governor Mario Cuomo. His 2014 book, Malcolm X at Oxford Union: Racial Politics in a Global Era, (Oxford University Press) was nominated for a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for best non-fiction book by an African American author. Ambar’s work also includes works of fiction that speak to the American experience, and he has published a short story, “The Frenchman and the Stranger,” in Seattle’s Monarch Review (2014), about an imagined meeting between Abraham Lincoln and Alexis de Tocqueville in 1831; he has written a play, The Mail Room, about race and class relationships in New York City in the 1980s, and he is currently working on his second novel. Congratulations to Professor Ambar! |
