Lawrence N. Powell taught history at Tulane University from 1978 until his retirement in June 2012 as the James H. Clark Endowed Chair in American Civilization. From 2000 to 2005 he was the Director of the Tulane/Xavier National Center for the Urban Community. From 2010 to 2012 he directed the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane. His most recent book is The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans (Harvard, 2012). Other publications include Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, the Holocaust, and David Duke’s Louisiana (UNC, 2000), reissued in a second edition in 2019, and New Masters: Northern Planters during the Civil War and Reconstruction (Yale, 2000; Fordham Univ. Press, 1999). He has won multiple book prizes and community service awards. A former Guggenheim Fellow, in 2008 he was elected as a Fellow in the Society of American Historians, in recognition of literary distinction in the writing of history. In 1999 he was named Louisiana Humanist of the Year. In 2014-15 he chaired the history jury for the Pulitzer Prize.
