R. Scott Hanson is a historian, educator, and public scholar with over 20 years of experience in higher education.

Most recently, he served as the Senior Scholar in Urban History and Material Culture in the Department of History and Lenfest Center for Cultural Partnerships at Drexel University where his teaching and research explored American urban history, immigration and ethnic history, religion, political rhetoric, civil rights, social justice movements, oral history, ethnography, folklore (including the history of music and foodways), and public history more generally. He also worked with the team of the Lenfest Center in the Atwater Kent Collection of the former Philadelphia History Museum on two exhibitions: “Seeing Philadelphia” at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and “Electrified: 50 Years of Electric Factory” at Drexel.

Previously, Hanson was a Lecturer in the Department of History and Director of the Social Justice Research Academy at the University of Pennsylvania, and an Adjunct Associate Professor of History and American Studies at Temple University. He was a Curatorial Research Associate at the American Philosophical Society where he helped curate exhibits on Thomas Jefferson’s years in Philadelphia, and in New York City he helped curate exhibits at Museum of the City of New York, the Queens Museum of Art, and Flushing Town Hall.

He received his B.A. in 1992 from the Plan II Liberal Arts Honors Program at the University of Texas at Austin, where he doubled majored in English Honors and concentrated in American literature, critical theory and creative writing. He then moved to New York City to begin an M.A. in Religion at Columbia University with Randall Balmer, where he started to focus on the intersection of American religious history and immigration and work as an office manager and research assistant for the late folklorist Alan Lomax and the Association for Cultural Equity. He began work as a researcher in New York City for Diana Eck’s Pluralism Project at Harvard University in 1994 after completing his M.A. He did much of the fieldwork in New York for the multimedia CD-ROM On Common Ground: World Religions in America, covering the Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Tibetan, Sri Lankan, Thai Buddhist, and some Muslim communities. He now serves as an Advisor to the Pluralism Project. His research in Queens ultimately led to a focus on the history and extreme case of religious pluralism in modern Flushing that he explored more fully as a doctoral student in the Committee on the History of Culture at the University of Chicago under the late Martin E. Marty. He returned to Columbia as an Exchange Scholar in 1999-2000 to study urban history with Kenneth Jackson and oral history with the late Ronald Grele.

His first book, City of Gods: Religious Freedom, Immigration, and Pluralism in Flushing, Queens, was published in July 2016 by Fordham University Press and their Empire State Editions imprint. A second printing was released in May 2017. City of Gods received a Starred Review from Publishers Weekly, which said it is an “[an] intimate portrait of lived religion… inspiring… deserves a place alongside Robert Orsi’s The Madonna of 115th Street.” It was also featured in a full-page story in the Sunday Book Review of The New York Times, which called it a “minutely detailed… case study of the promises and drawbacks of pluralism.” America: The Jesuit Review said it is “a timely book because it provides a framework for understanding current controversies over immigration.” A review in the journal of Ethnic and Racial Studies called it “outstanding,” the Journal of American Ethnic History said it is “exhaustively researched and compellingly written,” and the Journal of Urban History called it “a hopeful narrative… [and] rich community study.” His M.A. thesis at Columbia explored religious language in presidential inaugural addresses—a topic he has revisited in several news columns.

After receiving his Ph.D. from Chicago, Dr. Hanson worked as a postdoctoral research associate at Brown University, and he taught at Philadelphia University, Binghamton University-SUNY, Delaware Valley College before coming to Temple University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Drexel. A noted expert on pluralism in America, he has been interviewed for several newspapers, radio programs and on TV, he contributes occasional columns for newspapers and magazines, and he has also worked as a consultant for public schools seeking to create high school social justice courses modeled on the Social Justice Research Academy at Penn. He is also a founding member of Wake Up, America!, a nonprofit civic initiative led by educators, artists, and lawyers focused on strengthening democratic culture, public dialogue, and civic education.