Morris J. Vogel has been president of New York’s Lower East Side Tenement Museum since 2008. He trained as an American social and urban historian at Brandeis University (B.A. 1967) and the University of Chicago (Ph.D. 1974), before joining the faculty of Temple University in Philadelphia in 1973, where he was promoted to professor in 1985. He served in a number of leadership roles within Temple’s College of Liberal Arts, acting as dean of the College from 1999 through 2003. He subsequently directed the Rockefeller Foundation’s Creativity and Culture Program. Vogel is the author or editor of six books in American social and cultural history, including The Invention of the Modern Hospital and Cultural Connections. He co-founded and directed the National Endowment for the Humanities-funded Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities. While a Pennsylvanian, Vogel served on the Commonwealth’s Historic Preservation Board.
Vogel was born in Kazakhstan, where his mother and father were stateless refugees. He and his wife Ruth—a clinical psychologist—live in Manhattan; they have two adult sons.