History professor will give autumn commencement address

COLUMBUS – Kevin Boyle, Humanities Distinguished Professor of History at The Ohio State University, has been selected to speak at Ohio State autumn quarter commencement. Approximately 2,100 students will receive degrees at the ceremony, which begins at 2 p.m. on Sunday, December 13, at the Jerome Schottenstein Center.
Boyle, who teaches twentieth century American history, with an emphasis on class, race, and politics, received the National Book Award for non-fiction in 2004 for Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age.

Arc of Justice also received the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize, the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Tolerance Book Award, and the Society of Midland Authors Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It also was named a New York Times notable book for 2004, a State of Michigan notable book for 2005, and the 2007 selection for the Detroit metropolitan area's community-wide reading program.

Boyle's other books include The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, 1945-1968; Muddy Boots and Ragged Aprons: Images of Working-Class Detroit, 1900-1930, which he co-authored with Victoria Getis; and an edited volume, Organized Labor and American Politics, 1894-1994: the Labor-Liberal Alliance. He is at work on a new book, The Splendid Dead: An American Ordeal, which is to be published by Houghton Mifflin.

His articles have appeared in Diplomatic History, The Journal of American History, Labor History, The Michigan Historical Review, and various anthologies. He has also published essays and reviews in The Baltimore Sun, The Chicago Tribune, The Detroit Free Press, Inc. Magazine, the New York Times, and the Washington Post.
Boyle has held fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Fulbright Commission, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. In 1997-98 he held the Mary Ball Washington Chair in American History at University College Dublin, Ireland. He serves on the advisory board for the Walter P. Reuther Library, and on the editorial boards of Labor History and Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas. He is also a Fellow of the Society of American Historians and a member of the PEN American Center.

In addition, during the commencement ceremony, Ohio State will award the honorary doctor of public service to Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, the president of Iceland.

The university will also present Distinguished Service Awards to Mildred L. Chavous, retired staff member of Ohio State's graduate school, and John "Jack" W. Creighton, a 1957 graduate of the Moritz College of Law and Strategic Director of Madrona Venture Group, a Seattle-based venture capital company.