Benjamin Moore is Professor Emeritus at Fontbonne University in St. Louis, Missouri. He received his Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Iowa in 1992.
Ben began work on The Names of John Gergen in 2005 after finding in a dumpster John Gergen’s third-grade schoolwork, produced during the 1917-1918 school year. For fifteen years, he spent his spare time in libraries and research centers across the country learning what he could about young John, his family, and his community. The resulting book is both a biography of John Gergen, who died in 1935, and a social history of Soulard and the Banat Swabian immigrants who once lived there.
Ben’s growing interest in immigration also led to his work with St. Louis’s Bosnian refugees. In 2006 he co-founded the Bosnia Memory Project, dedicated to preserving the memory of St. Louis’s Bosnians by recording oral histories and collecting personal letters and artifacts. In 2020, the Bosnia Memory Project became the Center for Bosnian Studies, where Ben now serves as Senior Researcher.
Immigrant Identities in St. Louis, 1903-1935 