Joseph Amato is Professor emeritus of the Center for Rural and Regional Studies and Professor emeritus of History at Southwest Minnesota State University in Marshall, Minnesota.
Amato has written extensively on European cultural and intellectual history. His many books touch on the rural lifestyle and the threat posed by contemporary times. He has a special fondness for the chronicles of provincial America, which inspired him to write Rethinking Home: A Case for Writing Local History.
Born in Detroit, Michigan in 1938, Amato grew up in a working class family. He wrote a memoir, Bypass, about the experience. After graduating from the University of Michigan in 1960, Amato earned a Masters Degree in History from the Université de Laval, Québec, in 1963, and Ph.D. in history from the University of Rochester in 1970. In 1975-76 he studied the history of culture under a year-long NEH grant at U.C.L.A. He also received a certificate in Russian from the University of Indiana and studied historiography and Renaissance history at Wayne State University.
Amato taught high school before coming to the University of New York in Binghamton and the University of California at Riverside. He joined Southwest Minnesota State University in 1969.
He is the principal founder of the Society for Local and Regional History. In 2003 Amato was recognized as a Friend of the Humanities by the Minnesota Humanities Commission and as Prairie Star by the Southwest Minnesota Arts and Humanities Council.
Other titles by Professor Amato include Countryside, Mirror of Ourselves; When Father and Son Conspire: A Minnesota Farm Murder; The Great Jenusalem Artichoke Circus: The Buying and Selling of the Rural American Dream; Servants of the Land: God, Family, and Farm, the Trinity of Belgian Economic Folkways in Southwestern Minnesota; To Call It Home: The New Immigrants of Southwestern Minnesota, Dust: A History of the Small and the Invisible and collaborated with University of Nevada Professor Richard Davies on A Place Called Home: Writings on the Midwestern Small Town.
Amato's latest work is On Foot: A Cultural and Material History of Walking.
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