Lewis Johnson is Postdoctoral Researcher at the RIAS.
Lewis Johnson is a political historian of the twentieth-century United States. Trained at the University of Edinburgh, he is most interested in the history of the New Deal, World War II, and the origins of the Republican South. He earned his PhD in 2026 for the thesis entitled “‘Destination Dixie’: Republican Party Politics and the U.S South in the Age of Harry S. Truman, c. 1945-1952.” Supported by the Jenny Balston Scholarship, the project explored the relationship between the GOP and the South in the early post-World War II period. To date, his research has appeared in Presidential Studies Quarterly and History Today.
At the RIAS, Dr. Johnson is developing his PhD thesis into a scholarly monograph exploring how and why the New Deal catalyzed and shaped the growth of southern Republicanism. He aims to challenge conventional scholarly periodizations, which tend to focus on the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, by developing a longer-term framework for understanding the GOP’s success in the region.
