Research and Teaching Interests: History of American Education; American Urban History (especially material culture); Oral History; Family History; Course Portfolios and the Peer Review of Teaching.
 
 Personal Statement: My research and graduate teaching interests focus on the relationship between education and American culture. I have explored this relationship by studying the history of the school, the family, and the material culture of education. I teach the introductory graduate course in American history, a graduate course on the history of the family, using oral history as the principal research methodology, and a general research seminar in American history. My recent research includes the history of the home-school relationship in America since the middle of the nineteenth century and the material culture of American education, stressing school design, public buildings, and civic art. I am currently beginning a new project on the history the public school's role in the private lives of students and faculty.  It will consider school policy and practice having to do with such matters as personal behavior, religion, and language.  I also work on projects having to do with the scholarship of teaching and learning, which I have done in cooperation with the American Association for Higher Education, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and the American Historical Association.
 

Representative Publications:

 Parents and Schools: The 150-Year Struggle for Control in American Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

"A Competency-Based Approach to Teaching History Surveys," Perspectives: Newsmagazine of the American Historical Association 40 (April 2002), 27-29.

"The History Course Portfolio,"  Perspectives: Newsmagazine of the American Historical Association 35 (November 1997), 17-20. To see Professor Cutler's online portfolio for History 67, United States History to 1877, click here.

"A Church on Wheels: 1942-1963" ch. 8 in This Far by Faith: Tradition and Change in the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania
David R. Contosta, ed. (State College: Penn State Press, 2012), 263-297.

 "In Search of Influence and Authority: Parents and the Politics of the Home-School Relationship in Philadelphia and Two of its Suburbs, 1905-1935," Pennsylvania History (1996).

 "Symbol of Paradox in the New Republic: Classicism in the Design of Schoolhouses and Other Public Buildings in the United States, 1800-1860," in Aspects of Antiquity in the History of Education, F-P. Hager, et al., eds. (1992).

 "Cathedral of Culture: The Schoolhouse in American Educational Thought and Practice since 1820," History of Education Quarterly (1989).

 "Continuity and Discontinuity in the History of Childhood and the Family: A Reappraisal," History of Education Quarterly (1986).

 Co-editor (with Howard Gillette, Jr.), The Divided Metropolis: Social and Spatial Dimensions of Philadelphia, 1800-1975 (1980).

 "Status, Values and the Education of the Poor: The Trustees of the New York Public School Society, 1805-1853," American Quarterly (1972).
 
 

• Professor Cutler's article, "Status, Values, and the Education of the Poor," received the award as the best article published in American Quarterly in 1972.
• In spring, 1989, he was a guest lecturer at the University of Algiers.
• Professor Cutler was named a Carnegie Scholar by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching for 1999-2000.
• Professor Cutler was the director of the Temple University Awareness of Teaching and Teaching Improvement Center (ATTIC) in the College of Liberal Arts from 2000-2003.