Michael Gagnon

         Michael Gagnon was hired as an economic historian at William Paterson Fall Semester 1999. He received his PhD in American History from Emory University in Atlanta, where he received the Bellon Prize for best graduate student essay from the Atlanta Seminar on the Comparative History of Labor Industrialization, Technology and Society.

        Gagnon specializes in the history of early American industrialization, particularly focusing on textile manufacturing in the antebellum US South, and has presented numerous papers at scholarly conferences (including: "The Industrial Revolution in 19^th Century Georgia: An Evolutionary Model of Textile Industrialization," at the 1998 Economic History Association Conference, and "The Industrial Milieu of Henry Grady’s Youth: Manufacturing Tradition in Athens, Georgia, 1850-1875," at the 1996 Southern Historical Association Conference).

        He is a member of the History Department’s Information Technology faculty, and he has a strong interest in using locally available sources for illuminating historical themes of national importance. His publications include a series of computer assisted study guides for a laboratory medical specialty, and the Instructors’ Manual for The American Promise, an American History textbook available from Bedford Books. Dr. Gagnon is currently a member of the executive committee of the Southern Industrialization Project, and will resume as moderator of the group’s listserv in 2000.