Furstenberg was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Boston, Massachusetts, and Washington. His grandmother, Edith H. Furstenberg, was a social worker and daughter of Sidney Hollander,[2] a pharmacist who invented the Rem cough medicine and became a philanthropist.[3][4] She married prominent Baltimore physician Frank F. Furstenberg and advocate for national health care legislation.[5] His father, Mark Furstenberg, is a baker who runs the Bread Furst bakery and won a James Beard Foundation Award in 2017.[6][7][8] His uncle is the University of Pennsylvania sociologist Frank Furstenberg and his aunt, Carla Furstenberg Cohen, founded and owned the Chevy Chase bookstore Politics and Prose.[9]
Furstenberg received his B.A. from Columbia University and Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University.[10] His research focuses explores the history of the United States and the Atlantic World in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.[11] He has written about the history of slavery in the United States and the history of French émigrés in the United States.[12]
^Columbia College (Columbia University). Office of Alumni Affairs and Development; Columbia College (Columbia University) (December 2011). Columbia College today. Columbia University Libraries. New York, N.Y. : Columbia College, Office of Alumni Affairs and Development.