In the 2012/2013 academic year, he was the Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at the University of Oxford.

[4] A historian of the twentieth-century United States, he is particularly interested in three major areas of inquiry: 1) immigration, race, and nationality; 2) the significance of class in social and political life; and 3) social movements, popular politics, and the state.

[5] He has served as the Annenberg Visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and as a visiting professor at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (École des hautes études en sciences sociales aka EHESS) in Paris.

In addition to France, he has lectured throughout the United States and in Canada, England, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Brazil, Japan, and South Africa.

Gerstle has also lectured widely to the general public, and is often consulted by newspaper reporters, magazine writers, and television producers on matters pertinent to his areas of historical expertise.