David J. Bodenhamer

Executive Director Emeritus

David Bodenhamer is (founding) Executive Director of The Polis Center and Professor of History and Informatics at IUPUI. Prior to his appointment in 1989, he was Professor of History and Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs at the University of Southern Mississippi (1976-1988).

From 1989 to 2020, he received grants and contracts totaling over $50 million including awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Lilly Endowment, National Library of Medicine, U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Department of Commerce, U.S. Department of Education, and Fairbanks Foundation, among numerous other research and service contracts with federal, state, and local governments, not-for-profit organizations, and private corporations. During this period, The Polis Center received over $95 million in external awards, including the $50 million mentioned above; on all Polis awards he served as PI, but numerous grants were developed as a collaborative enterprise with center staff. Additional solicited gifts (private) since 1989 exceed $1,000,000. A list of awards is available upon request.

He has served as strategic and organizational consultant to universities, government agencies, and not-for-profit and faith-based organizations across the U.S. and in Europe.

An active researcher, Bodenhamer is author or editor of 13 books and has published over 50 journal articles, chapters in books, and encyclopedia articles. He has made more than 90 presentations, including numerous keynote addresses, to audiences on four continents on topics ranging from legal and constitutional history to the use of GIS and advanced information technologies in academic and community-based research. Among his books in American constitutional and legal history are Fair Trial: Rights of the Accused in American History (Oxford University Press, 1993), Our Rights (Oxford University Press, 2007)), The Revolutionary Constitution (Oxford University Press. 2012), and The U.S. Constitution: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2018).

Bodenhamer’s work in the new field of spatial humanities includes The Spatial Humanities: GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship (Indiana University Press, 2010) and Deep Maps and Spatial Narratives (Indiana University Press, 2015), in addition to a dozen published essays. Both books were developed with Professors John Corrigan (religious studies) and Trevor Harris (geography), collaborators in the interdisciplinary Virtual Center for Spatial Humanities (VCSH), an institutional partnership among Florida State University, West Virginia University, and IUPUI.

Bodenhamer serves as co-director of the VCSH, which he created with Corrigan and Harris in 2008 to advance the field of spatial humanities. He also serves as co-general editor of the Indiana University Press Series on Spatial Humanities, which moved to Routledge in 2020; co-editor of the IJHAC: A Journal of the Digital Humanities (formerly the International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing, Edinburgh University Press); and co-general editor of the Indiana University Press publications of the  Polis Center Series on Religion and Urban Culture.