Bio

Logan Istre is a research and teaching fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, where he contributes to the History Lab’s Global Futures Working Group.

As a historian of the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century United States, Istre specializes in social networks, political economy, and institutional development. His current book project, "Plowman’s Progress: The Movement that Remade Rural America," studies organized farmers not as populists but as state-building progressives, revealing how middle-class agrarians established research institutions and government bureaus to reconstruct the rural economy. Istre’s other interests range from constitutional politics and economic ideology to American populism. His next research project is a wide-ranging study of the interaction of social elites and popular political movements from the Civil War to the Great Depression. His scholarly work is forthcoming or has appeared in journals like The Journal of Southern History and The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era while his public-oriented writing has featured in a variety of venues.

Before coming to Stanford, Istre received his PhD in US history at Louisiana State University, where his work was supported by a University Dissertation Fellowship as well as grants from the Agricultural History Society and Forest History Society. Prior to his doctoral studies, Istre benefited from a James Madison Memorial Fellowship to pursue his master’s degree and taught high school in New Orleans.

Academic Appointments

  • Research and Teaching Fellow, HOOVER RESEARCH