Bruce M. Stave

Bruce M. Stave (May 17, 1937 – December 2, 2017) was an American historian specializing in oral history and urban history. He was a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Connecticut, where he taught for decades.

Education Stave was born in Brooklyn on May 17, 1937. He received his BA and MA from Columbia University and PhD in history from the University of Pittsburgh, where he held an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation predoctoral fellowship.

Career Stave began his academic career at the University of Bridgeport in 1965. He spent 1968 teaching as a Fulbright Program scholar in India. In 1970 he joined the University of Connecticut and moved to Coventry, Connecticut. Stave subsequently held Fulbright scholarships in Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines in 1977 and at Peking University in 1984–1985. According to historian Richard D. Brown, Stave was "recognized around the world for his leadership in the field" of oral history. He advised oral history projects and practitioners in Argentina, Chile, China, Costa Rica, Cyprus, Greece, Kenya, New Zealand, the Philippines, Poland, Slovenia, South Africa, Sweden, and Turkey. Stave retired from UConn in 2002 but continued to work for the university in various capacities.

Scholarship Stave served as director of UConn's Center for Oral History from 1978 to 2008 and history department chair from 1985 to 1994. He was editor of the Oral History Review from 1996 to 1999, and associate editor of the Journal of Urban History, both leading journals in their fields. With Linda Shopes, he was general editor of the Palgrave Studies in Oral History series, which had published thirty volumes by the time of Stave's death in 2017. He also authored or edited eleven books, including Red Brick in the Land of Steady Habits (2006), a history of UConn that the university commissioned to mark its 125th anniversary.

Service Active in professional organizations, Stave served as president of the New England Historical Association (1994–1995), the New England Association of Oral History, and the Connecticut Coordinating Committee for the Promotion of History, which he had founded in 1979. He served as a vice president of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences and on the boards of the Connecticut Humanities Council and the Association for the Study of Connecticut History. In 2008, Governor Jodi Rell appointed him Acting Connecticut State Historian, in which capacity he served on the Connecticut Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission. He was survived by his wife as well as their son and only child, Channing.

Selected works

Red Brick in the Land of Steady Habits: Creating the University of Connecticut, 1881–2006 (University Press of New England, 2006) – winner of the 2007 Homer D. Babbidge Jr. Award for "best book on a significant aspect of Connecticut's history" from the Association for the Study of Connecticut History.