François Furstenberg

Furstenberg was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Boston, Massachusetts, and Washington. His grandmother, Edith H. Furstenberg, was a social worker and daughter of Sidney Hollander,^[1] a pharmacist who invented the Rem cough medicine and became a philanthropist.^[2][3] She married prominent Baltimore physician Frank F. Furstenberg and advocated for national health care legislation.^[4] His father, Mark Furstenberg, is a baker who runs the Bread Furst bakery and won a James Beard Foundation Award in 2017.^[5][6][7] His uncle is the University of Pennsylvania sociologist Frank Furstenberg and his aunt, Carla Furstenberg Cohen, founded and owned the Chevy Chase bookstore Politics and Prose.^[8]

Furstenberg received his B.A. from Columbia University (1994) and his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University (2003),^[9][10] where he was advised by Dorothy Ross.^[11]

Furstenberg has taught at the Université de Montréal (2003–2014) and currently teaches at Johns Hopkins University (2014–), where he has also served as director of undergraduate studies.^[10]

His research focuses on the history of the United States and the Atlantic World in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.^[10] He has written about George Washington and the history of slavery in the United States, in In the Name of the Father: Washington’s Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation (2006),^[10] and the history of French émigrés in the United States in When the United States Spoke French: Five Refugees who Shaped a Nation (2014).^[12] In the course of writing the second, he was a fellow of the New York Public Library's Cullman Center 2009–2010.^[13]

He was a historical consultant for the American Revolution-themed video game Assassin's Creed III 2010–2012.^[14]

Furstenberg was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 2013,^[13][15] and he is a distinguished lecturer for the Organization of American Historians.^[16]