A leading educational innovator and an award-winning teacher and author, Professor Mintz is an authority on families, children, youth, and the life course. He has also published extensively on slavery, social reform, ethnicity, and film.
For five years, he served as the founding director of The University of Texas System’s Institute for Transformational Learning, which was responsible for designing and testing new educational models and technologies that can make a quality education more accessible, affordable, and successful. To achieve those goals, the institute developed breakthrough pathways to a meaningful credential, created technologies to support immersive and personalized education, and harnessed the power of fine-grained learning analytics.
He also served as senior advisor to the president of Hunter College for student success and director of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Arts & Sciences Teaching Center.
As a historian, he is the author of 15 books, including The Prime of Life: A History of Modern Adulthood, a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, and Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood, which received major prizes from the Association of American Publishers, the Organization of American Historians, and the Texas Institute of Letters.
A former fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and a visiting scholar at Harvard’s Center for European Studies, he came to UT from Columbia University. He has also taught at Oberlin College, the University of Houston, Harvard University’s Extension School, Pepperdine University, and Universitat-GH-Siegen.
In addition, he has served as president of the Society for the History of Children and Youth, and chaired the Council on Contemporary Families, an organization of leading academics and clinicians committed to improving the public conversation on families and their needs.
A pioneer in the application of new technologies to historical research and teaching, he is past president of H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online, which serves over 200,000 academics world-wide. He is also the creator of the Digital History website, which is used by 150,000 teachers and students a week and which has been named one of the Top 5 sites in U.S. history and been placed on the National Endowment for the Humanities EdSitement list of exemplary online resources in the humanities.
In addition to playing an active role in the professional development of K-12 teachers and in programs to bring students from historically underrepresented groups into the professoriate, he is a member of the Society of American Historians, whose members are chosen on the basis of literary distinction. He has also chaired the Bancroft Prize and Frederick Douglass Book Prize juries, served as a juror for the Lincoln Prize, and received over $15 million in external funding, including two National Endowment for the Humanities Challenge Grants.
He blogs on Inside Higher Ed and Psychology Today. His writings have also been featured in The Washington Post.