Dr. Gabriel Loiacono, Visiting Assistant Professor of History

Telephone: 336-841-9409
Office: David Hayworth Hall 216
Email: gloiacon@highpoint.edu

Professor Loiacono was born and raised in the foggy neighborhoods of San Francisco, California, where a series of excellent high school history teachers fired him with a passion for stories about the past. He flirted briefly with other majors in college, but after completing an internship in the National Archives in Washington, DC, he knew that he wanted to devote his career to being an historian. He initially studied at a San Francisco community college and went on to receive his BA in History from the University of California, Berkeley. After college, looking for a way to both be an historian and work outdoors, Loiacono became a National Park Ranger at the Lincoln Memorial and other sites on the National Mall in Washington. Eventually, he sought more advanced training in history at Brandeis University, in Waltham, Massachusetts, where he received his Ph.D. in 2008.

Loiacono's main teaching interests are histories of moral questions, governance, and the distinctions that people made among themselves in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America. He has taught the history of race and ethnicity in America at Clark University; a history of American identities and cultures at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy, Boston; and the history of reform and anti-reform movements in antebellum America at Brandeis University. This last course was a winner of the University Prize Instructorship at Brandeis. At High Point University, he offers general courses and a graduate course in American history, focusing especially on the invention and practice of American democracy, the rise of distinctly American ideas about race and ethnicity, and periods of dramatic change.

Loiacono's dissertation focuses on "paupers," as the people who received public assistance prior to the 1930s were called. His dissertation tracks the experiences of paupers as they moved from the scattered houses of neighbors and family to centralized poorhouses and back again. His research also demonstrates the centrality of paupers as stereotypical figures in 19th-century American political life, which has been previously overlooked. The figure of the pauper helped to shape national conversations about race, ethnicity, immigration, gender, and American identity.

For his next major project, Loiacono intends to write a book about "town fathers," the men who made up local governments in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Often forgotten, these minor officials exercised more power over ordinary Americans than any President or Supreme Court Justice. Focusing on case studies from different regions of the early American republic, this book will tell the story of where these men came from, what motivated them to strive for local office, and how they ruled their neighbors.

Although he is a devoted historian, Loiacono has several ongoing "research" projects in areas outside of history: learning Hungarian, remembering how to play guitar after six years of doing little besides reading history books, and becoming an offensive threat in basketball (his defense has remained pretty solid through his graduate school years).