François Furstenberg

Early life and education Furstenberg was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Boston, Massachusetts, and Washington. His grandmother, Edith H. Furstenberg, was a social worker and daughter of Sidney Hollander, a pharmacist who invented the Rem cough medicine and became a philanthropist. She married prominent Baltimore physician Frank F. Furstenberg and advocated for national health care legislation. His father, Mark Furstenberg, is a baker who runs the Bread Furst bakery and won a James Beard Foundation Award in 2017. His uncle is the University of Pennsylvania sociologist Frank Furstenberg and his aunt, Carla Furstenberg Cohen, founded and owned the Chevy Chase bookstore Politics and Prose.

Furstenberg received his B.A. from Columbia University (1994) and his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University (2003),

Career Furstenberg has taught at the Université de Montréal (2003–2014) and currently teaches at Johns Hopkins University (2014–), where he has also served as director of undergraduate studies. He has written about George Washington and the history of slavery in the United States, in In the Name of the Father: Washington’s Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation (2006), In the course of writing the second, he was a fellow of the New York Public Library's Cullman Center 2009–2010.

Furstenberg was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 2013, and he is a distinguished lecturer for the Organization of American Historians.

Works In the Name of the Father: Washington’s Legacy, Slavery, and the Making of a Nation (2006) When the United States Spoke French: Five Refugees who Shaped a Nation (2014)