Colin Gordon, professor in the Department of History, has received the University of Iowa Distinguished Achievement in Publicly Engaged Research Award for 2015. 

The award “recognizes a faculty member who has put addressing public needs and direct engagement with the public in the service of improving quality of life through research at the forefront of their academic activities.”

Gordon writes on the history of American public policy and political economy. He is the author of Growing Apart: A Political History of American Inequality (Institute for Policy Studies, 2013); Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Dead on Arrival: The Politics of Health in Twentieth Century America (Princeton University Press, 2003), and New Deals: Business, Labor and Politics, 1920-1935 (Cambridge University Press, 1994). He has written for the Nation, In These Times, Z Magazine, Atlantic Cities, and Dissent (where he is a regular contributor). His digital projects include Mapping Decline, an interactive mapping project based on his St. Louis research; Digital Johnson County, a mapping collaboration with the UI Libraries, the Office of State Archeologist, the DNR, and the State Historical Society of Iowa; and The Telltale Chart, a data visualization project focusing on historical and recent economic data.

He is a senior research consultant at the Iowa Policy Project, for which he has written or co-written reports on health coverage, economic development, and wages and working conditions (including the biennial State of Working Iowa series).

Gordon received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1990, and joined the UI faculty in 1994.