U.S. Intellectual History Blog

Panel Ideas!

indianapolis_2010In lieu of a forum, which has seemed too clunky, please use this post to suggest and exchange panel ideas for the 2014 S-USIH conference in Indianapolis.  I have embedded a link to this post on the 2014 conference page so that people can find it without searching through the blog.  My hope is that the comments section can function well enough as a way to connect and put together panels.  I also posted an announcement regarding this particular exchange in the member news section on the front page of the website.

Thanks and we look forward to seeing you in Indy this fall.

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  1. Panel Name: “The Enlightenment’s Second Life: Twentieth-Century American Legacies and Iterations.”

    Ill fared the Enlightenment and its legacy during the twentieth century. Even in the United States where, as Henry May’s classic The Enlightenment in America noted, only a moderate variant of its temperament and philosophy took root, intellectuals critiqued forms of thought associated with the Enlightenment. Intellectual historians have diligently traced various permutations of this critical impulse including: the “antimodernists” of the late nineteenth century, New Humanists of the early twentieth, Frankfort School importation of critical theory in the mid-, and the postmodern assault on “metanarratives” and universals during the late-twentieth century. A less explored perspective on the Enlightenment and its American legacies, however, are its twentieth-century proponents.

    This panel will investigate the various defenses of ideas and projects intellectuals have associated with Enlightenment thought. The aim is to discover the implications of these defenses for twentieth century American intellectual life. Papers should focus on both the intellectual as well as broader material contours and consequences of various modern heirs to the Enlightenment since many of the “policy disciplines” such as economics have been home to its most fervent defenders. In approaching the twentieth-century American iterations of the Enlightenment from this angle, this panel hopes to illuminate its lasting impact as well as begin to strike a balance with the current literature that focuses more on its critics than its proponents.

    Those interested in participating in this panel should contact Brad Baranowski (University of Wisconsin-Madison) at [email protected]

    Brad Baranowski
    Doctoral Candidate
    History Department
    University of Wisconsin-Madison

    [email protected]

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