James Turner
James Turner is Cavanaugh Professor of Humanities and Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame. He taught for 20 years at the University of Notre Dame, where he belonged to both the History Department and the graduate Program in History and Philosophy of Science. Before moving to Notre Dame in 1995, he taught for eleven years at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and for shorter periods before that at the University of Massachusetts-Boston and the College of Charleston. His research interest lies in American and modern British intellectual history, especially the history of academic knowledge. He is currently at work on both the origins of modern academic disciplinarity and the influential Scottish scholar William Robertson Smith (1846-1894). Since 2015, he has lived in Taos, New Mexico, where on clear nights he can be found in his observatory with a 275-mm modified Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope. He has been married for 55 years to Julie Turner, emerita professor of psychology at Notre Dame. They have two sons and three grandsons.