WILLIAM (BILL) ISSEL
BIOGRAPHICAL PROFILE
Complete CV
contact: bi@sfsu.edu

Bill Issel is Professor of History Emeritus at San Francisco State University and a Visiting Professor of History at Mills College.  He attended public and parochial schools in San Francisco and began his history work as a student in the honors program of the University of California, Berkeley, History Department before transferring to San Francisco State College, where he earned B.A. and M.A. degrees in American History.  He joined the doctoral program at University of Pittsburgh where he focused on American labor history and political history, then moved to the University of Pennsylvania where he studied American literature, cultural anthropology and political sociology, earning A.M. and Ph.D. degrees in American Civilization.  He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa.

A specialist in American culture, society, and politics since the Civil War, Issel taught in the History, Humanities, and Urban Studies departments at San Francisco State from 1968 to 2006 and served as Coordinator of the American Studies Program and Associate Chair of the History Department.  He received numerous awards for excellence in teaching and advising at San Francisco State, and he received grants in support of his research and public history projects from the National Endowment of Humanities, the California Council for the Humanities, and the Rockefeller Foundation.  From 1963 until 1968, he taught at the University of Pittsburgh, the Camden campus of Rutgers-the State University of New Jersey, and directed the history section of the Thirteen College Program at historically black colleges in the South.  In 1978-1979, he was a Fulbright Professor at the University of Westminster (formerly the Polytechnic of Central London), and during the 2008-2009 academic year, he served as the László Országh Chair in American Studies, a Fulbright Distinguished Lecturing Award, at the University of Pécs in Hungary.  

Issel has taught and has published books and articles on a variety of topics related to the social, cultural, and political  history of the United States in the twentieth century.  His most recent book, the story of  the ordeal of Sylvester Andriano, a San Francisco Catholic Action leader falsely accused of Fascism in 1942, was published by Temple University Press in December, 2009.  In addition to extensive lecturing to academic and general audiences in the U.S. and in England and Europe, he  has done considerable public history consulting work, including serving as the guest curator for the San Francisco history and culture exhibit that marked the 1996 opening of the New Main Public Library in the San Francisco Civic Center.  He was a consultant for the Boston firm designing the proposed San Francisco History Museum and co-authored the museum master plan.  He currently serves on the coordinating committee of the Bay Area Labor History Workshop, the U.S. advisory board of the Hungarian American Studies journal  Focus: Literary and Cultural Studies, and the board of the Northern California Labor Archives and Research Center.  Previous service includes the council of the American Historical Association Pacific Coast Branch, editorial board of the Pacific Historical Review, board of directors of the Urban History Association, and U.S. advisory board of the American Studies Centre in London.

Issel is married, the father of five adult children, and he has four grandchildren.  He lives in Berkeley.