About the Speaker

Alan Bliss has served as CEO of the Jacksonville Historical Society and Jacksonville History Center since 2018. Previously, he taught at the University of North Florida, where his U.S. history courses included urban history, maritime history, the Great Depression and New Deal, Civil Rights, the Cold War, and seminars on public history.

Bliss holds Bachelor’s (summa cum laude) and Master’s degrees, as well as a Ph.D., from the University of Florida, where he investigated the twentieth-century metropolitan political economy in the American Sunbelt. His 2010 dissertation, Making a Sunbelt Place, focused on metropolitan growth in Tampa, Florida, from 1923 to 1964. He has presented his research at numerous national academic conferences. Bliss lectures and consults widely on U.S. history, preservation, and historic resources. In 2015, he authored a 50-year history of Jacksonville’s Haskell Company.

Bliss’s memberships include the Jacksonville Chamber of Commerce Downtown Council, the First Coast Tiger Bay Club, the U.S. Naval Institute, and the Naval Order of the United States. From 2017 to 2019, he served on the Board of Directors of Fonkoze USA, Inc., a microfinance and development nonprofit serving Haiti’s rural ultra-poor. Before returning to higher education, he worked in real estate management, appraisal, and development. For 25 years, he held a U.S. Coast Guard master’s license for inspected passenger vessels and is an experienced offshore sailor. He continues to enjoy boating on the St. Johns River and surrounding waters.