New York University professor Daniel Walkowitz loves history and he loves to move. “Any city I go to, I dance,” said Mr. Walkowitz, who has kicked up his heels at folk-dancing events in New York, London, Minneapolis, San Francisco, San Jose, Baltimore, Washington, Philadelphia, and London, among other cities. He has performed with a Balkan troupe based in Baltimore, led workshops in Scandinavian dance, and is a teacher of English country dance with Country Dance New York, which hoofs it up weekly at a church in Greenwich Village.

His current project manages to combine both his scholarly interest and his personal passion for dance. Mr. Walkowitz is writing a book called “City Folk: English Country Dance and the Politics of the Folk in 20th Century America.” A public television documentary made with support from the Smithsonian’s Center for Folk Life and Cultural Heritage will complement the book.

Mr. Walkowitz said more Americans learn about history from television than from reading. “It’s as much a problem as an opportunity,” he said. It’s important that historians themselves be involved in making shows: History, he said, is too important to be left to filmmakers alone. He has been at the forefront of the field of public history, which trains academics to address a broader public through films and museum exhibitions.

“Why do urban people think it’s fun to emulate the folk and whom do they think they’re emulating?” Mr. Walkowitz asks in his research. English country dance has been in America for a long time. “George Washington,” Mr. Walkowitz said, “was a great country dancer, renowned for his fine form and fancy footwork.” In the 19th century, country dancing lost out in popularity to waltzes and polka – ballroom dances that allowed more intimate physical contact.

America has had two folk revivals. The first occurred around the turn of the 20th century and coincided with the rise of industrialization. As immigrants and rural migrants streamed into urban centers, they romanticized rural life as something natural.

A second resurgence occurred after World War II, and its spirit continues to influence the dance community today. In the 1960s, dancers felt that participating allied them with “common people,” with whom they preferred to identify. They were turning their backs on the materialism of mainstream culture, Mr. Walkowitz said.

Today, folk dancers see it as a way to escape the “speed and greed” of contemporary culture. He said the groups are largely middle-class and white. “If you go folk dancing, you meet computer experts, journalists, professors. You won’t necessarily find a truck driver or plumber.” There are relatively few blacks, Asians, and Hispanics who engage in English country dance, he said.

Country dance, Mr. Walkowitz said, provides a “cultural window on a society.” Through it, one can see coyness, passivity, and flirtation. English country dancing, whose origins lay in social dances of village and gentry from medieval England through the 1800s, most typically involves lined sets of couples, and live music performed on a piano, fiddle, or concertina. Steps have arcane names such as “circular hey” and “pousette.”

Historical research on dance is an interdisciplinary endeavor. Mr. Walkowitz feels that “we are working in a post-disciplinary moment.” As director of college honors at New York University, he is currently working with colleagues to form a new department called “social and cultural analysis” to draw together disciplines such as American studies, gender and sexuality studies, Asian studies, and Latino studies.

Mr. Walkowitz was exposed to the arts as a child in a progressive household filled with books, music, and ideas in northern New Jersey. His grandmother was a Bundist involved in left-wing labor activities. His father left school in 10th grade to become a labor organizer, but later earned his high school equivalency. A linoleum salesman, he was also described by his son as the philosopher of West Broadway in Patterson, N.J. Mr. Walkowitz was the first person in the family to graduate from college.

Growing up in suburbia in the era of sputnik, he was a math and science whiz. He won a physics scholarship and wanted to be a meteorologist. He said he quickly realized he was more interested in becoming a TV weatherman. He had long been active in community theater, starring in plays like “Love Rides the Rails,” or theatrical productions of Noel Coward and S. Ansky’s “The Dybbuk.”

While at the University of Rochester, he headed an experimental drama group. He was accepted for graduate study at Harvard which would have allowed him to work with the Loeb Theater, when an intellectual historian at Rochester, where he majored as an undergraduate in English, convinced him to stay and pursue history.

Mr. Walkowitz was active in civil rights demonstrations, and later, during the Vietnam War, was among a group of graduate students at the University of Rochester brought up for charges over a Dow chemical sit-in. The students were expelled but reinstated after members of the history faculty threatened to strike.

His graduate dissertation adviser, Herbert Gutman, instilled in him a “deep appreciation of the vitality of working class life and people.”

Mr. Walkowitz published his first book on iron and cotton worker protests in 19th-century Troy and Cohoes, N.Y. He helped adapt it for a 90-minute docudrama on American Playhouse. A later book, “Working with Class: Social Workers and the Politics of Middle-Class Identity” (University of North Carolina) asked two questions, he said: “How do you write a history of the working class when everybody thinks they’re middle class?”; and “Why do my colleagues think that unionization is an inappropriate form of behavior for professionals to engage in yet complain about increased workloads?”

Mr. Walkowitz met his wife, Judith, at the University of Rochester on Thanksgiving in 1963; they recently celebrated their 39th wedding anniversary. She is a feminist historian at Johns Hopkins University. Their daughter, Rebecca, teaches English at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

His interest in labor and social history is evident not only in his choice of scholarly topics but in his family’s cats, Bellamy and Josephine, named for the 19th-century utopian novelist Edward Bellamy and British suffragist Josephine Butler.

Asked what makes good historical writing, he said work that “does not confirm our prejudices but challenge us.” He added, “Thinking begins when people become uncomfortable.”