Lloyd Kramer was born in Maryville, Tennessee, and graduated from Maryville College. He received his PhD from Cornell University in 1983. Before entering Cornell, he was a teacher in Hong Kong and he traveled widely in Asia. After completing his graduate studies, he taught at Stanford University and Northwestern University. Since 1986 he has been a member of the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he is currently a professor of history and the director of Carolina Public Humanities- a program that serves K-12 educators and other communities outside the university. He has served two terms as chair of his department and received two awards for distinguished undergraduate teaching. His writings include Threshold of a New World: Intellectuals and the Exile Experience in Paris, 1830- 1848 (1988); Lafayette in Two Worlds: Public Cultures and Personal Identities in an Age of Revolutions (1996), which won the Gilbert Chinard Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies and the Annibel Jenkins Biography Prize from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies; and Nationalism in Europe and America: Politics, Cultures, and Identities since 1775 (2011). He has also co-edited several books, including a collection of essays on historical education in America and A Companion to Western Historical Thought (2002). He has been a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study and a Fellow at the National Humanities Center; and he served as president of the Society for French Historical Studies.