Ronald P. Formisano

Ronald P. Formisano (elected October 1980) died on February 20, 2024. A historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century US political culture, Formisano wrote ten scholarly books. His early works, state-level studies of political culture, helped transform scholars’ understanding of the emergence of political parties. Formisano was a member of Clark University’s history department from 1973 to 1989. He moved to the University of Florida and ultimately in 2001 to the University of Kentucky, as the William T. Bryan Chair of American History. Formisano served as an editor of the Journal of American History and as president of the New England Historical Association. More recently, he wrote “muckraking fiction,” penning four detective novels, the last of which appeared in 2023.