Jonathan Mark Souther

Mark Souther is Professor of History and director of the Center for Public History + Digital Humanities (CPHDH) at Cleveland State University. He is an expert in 20th century U.S. history, urban history, suburban history, tourism, historic preservation, and public history.    

Since his arrival at CSU in 2003, Dr. Souther has authored three books and 19 peer-reviewed articles and chapters and co-edited one book. His first book, New Orleans on Parade: Tourism and the Transformation of the Crescent City (LSU Press, 2006) won the Kemper & Leila Williams Prize for Best Book in Louisiana History from the Historic New Orleans Collection and Louisiana Historical Association and the Gulf South History Book Award from the Gulf South Historical Association. His second book Believing in Cleveland: Managing Decline in “The Best Location in the Nation” was published in 2017 by Temple University Press. His most recent book Sandhill Cities: Metropolitan Ambitions in Augusta, Columbus, and Macon, Georgia was published in 2025 by LSU Press. His current book project is “Hostess City: Tourism and the Making of Modern Savannah.” His scholarship has won the Hugh F. Rankin Prize from the Louisiana Historical Association and the honorable mention for the Journal of Planning History Prize from the Society for American City and Regional Planning History (SACRPH). He has also written two National Register of Historic Places district nominations.    

As director of CPHDH, Dr. Souther has garnered more than $2.2 million in external funding, including three Digital Humanities Advancement Grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in 2014, 2017, and 2020. Two of these grants supported an innovative collaboration with Maseno University that resulted in a pioneering digital project Macleki that curated place-based histories in Kisumu, Kenya. He currently directs multiple digital history projects: Cleveland Historical (an award-winning mobile app that curates places throughout Cleveland), Green Book Cleveland (a website that maps and documents historic sites of African American leisure and entertainment in Northeast Ohio), Queer Cleveland (a mapping project focusing on LGBTQ+ sites), and Cleveland Voices (with more than 1,350 oral histories conducted in concert with dozens of community partners). He also directs development of two location-based storytelling tools: Curatescape (a web and mobile framework based on the Omeka CMS and used by institutions worldwide) and PlacePress (a modern WordPress plugin).    

Dr. Souther has served on the SACRPH Board of Directors, Cleveland Heights Landmark Commission, and as an expert reviewer for the NEH and Whiting Foundation. He co-chaired the committee that brought the SACRPH National Conference on Planning History to Cleveland in 2017. He is the recipient of the University Distinguished Faculty Award for Research, the John Nolen Research Fund Award from the Cornell University Library, and the Ohio Faculty Council Technology Commercialization Award. He has been interviewed in numerous media, including ESPN, WBUR Boston, Ideastream, WWNO New Orleans, The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, USA Today, Investor’s Business Daily, and The Plain Dealer.    

He is also an active musician, performing on trumpet with Cleveland Repertory Orchestra, the Cleveland Winds, and Euclid Symphony Orchestra.