Paul Custer

• Ph.D., M.A., History, University of Iowa
• B.A., History, University of Chicago

Paul Custer is a professor of history at Lenoir-Rhyne and joined the LR faculty in 2002. Custer’s central teaching and scholarly interests relate to modern Britain and early and modern Europe, most specifically in gender/class relationships.

A native of Des Moines, Iowa, Custer chose his doctoral program mainly to work with Deirdre McCloskey. He worked on the social and economic history of the British cotton industry and spent a year in the archives in and around Manchester doing archival work.

Since then, Custer has continued to refine and expand his work on the cotton industry, publishing three pieces based on it, with more in the works. Along the way, he developed a keen and precocious interest in philosophical anthropology, beginning with Paul Ricoeur and extending now to Hannah Arendt. Custer has prepared an article and book proposal on Ricoeur and is presently working on an essay titled, “The Hannah Arendt Toolkit for Historians.”

In 2007, Custer received the Lenoir-Rhyne Faculty Scholar Award, which is presented to the faculty member who has made the greatest contribution to his/her discipline during the academic year.