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Program for the Second Annual USIH Conference
Center for the Humanities
The Graduate Center
CUNY
November 12-13, 2009
[Updated: 11/9/2009 9:20 AM CST]
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Program Notes:
1. All functions will take place in one of seven places: Martin E. Segal Theatre and Rooms C201-205, C197.
2. Conference headquarters, beverage service, and publisher tables will be in C197. This room will open at 3 pm on Thursday, Nov. 12.
3. No money will change hands at the conference. All registration fees should be paid prior to, or after, attendance. The cost is $35 and checks should be sent to: The Center for the Humanities, c/o Michael Washburn, Assistant Director, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, 365 Fifth Avenue, Room 5103, New York, NY 10016.
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Thursday, Nov. 12, 2009
1-3 pm
Martin E. Segal Theatre, Plenary Address
“Seeing, Hearing, and Writing the End of Modernity: From Reading Pragmatism to Watching Movies”
James Livingston, Rutgers University
3:30-5:30 pm
Martin E. Segal Theatre, Panel 1
Creating and Contesting Intellectual Traditions in 20th-Century American Thought
Black and Chicano Power in the Academy: The Intellectual Origins of Identity Politics
Andrew Hartman, Illinois State University
Antifoundationalism on Native Grounds
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Black Progressives: The Politics of Knowledge in the Age of Washington
James Anders Levy, Hofstra University
Commentator: Martin Woessner, City University of New York
C201, Panel 2
Reconsidering Pragmatism and the Cold War Era
‘Postmodern, Bourgeois, Cold War Liberalism’: Rethinking Rorty and Late Twentieth Century Pragmatism
Anthony Hutchison, University of Nottingham
Pragmatism and the Civil Rights Movement: A (Re)consideration
Peter Kuryla, Belmont University
Pragmatism and American Thought at Mid-Century
Jeffrey Coker, Belmont University
Commentator: Ray Haberski, Marian College
C202, Panel 3
Intellectual Legacy of the 1960s
Confronting a “crisis in historical perspective”: Gabriel Kolko, Walter LaFeber and the History of American Empire during the Late Cold War
Nick Witham, University of Nottingham
David Horowitz, Todd Gitlin, and the Debate Over the Legacy of the 1960s
Jason D. Roberts, Northern Virginia Community College
Slaughterhouse at Forty: Kurt Vonnegut’s Dresden Novel, Revisited
Gregory Sumner, University of Detroit Mercy
Commentator: David Engerman, Brandeis University
C203, Panel 4
Abstracting Technology and Science
Mimeographed Community: The mimeographed report and the rise of intellectual communities in early 20th century U.S.
Sylwester Ratowt, American Philosophical Society
Social Constructions of Nature and the Creation of the American City
Michael J. Rawson, Brooklyn College
Ambiguous Intellectual Boundary-Work of U.S. Demographers in Facing Postwar World Population Growth
Yu-Ling Huang, SUNY-Binghamton
Commentator: Neil B. Miller, Independent Scholar/H-Ideas Advisory Board
C204, Panel 5
Bridging the Class Divide in Progressive America
Wealth Taxation and Redistribution – Then and Now
Alexandra Wagner, Brandeis University
Corn-Pone Opinions: Liberalism and Political Economy in “The Age of Discussion”
Mark Schmeller, Northeastern Illinois University
Beyond Uplift: Democratizing Conversation in Progressive-era Chicago
Amy Kittelstrom, Sonoma State University/Princeton University
Commentator: John Recchiuti, Mount Union College
C205, Panel 6
“Brownie, You’re Doing a Heck of a Job”: Conservative Ideology and the American State During the Age of Reagan
Conservative Ideology & Policymaking in the Age of Reagan
Timothy Kneeland, Nazareth College
Ronald Reagan’s Pragmatic Conservatism
Jon Peterson, Ohio University
Hurricane Andrew and Reagan’s American State
Natalie Schuster, University of Houston
Commentator: Jeffrey Bloodworth, Gannon University
6:30-8:30 pm
Martin E. Segal Theatre, John Patrick Diggins Retrospective
Neil Jumonville, Florida State University
Martin J. Burke, CUNY Graduate Center/Lehman College
James Oakes, CUNY Graduate Center
James Livingston, Rutgers University
Andrew Robertson, CUNY Lehman College
Matthew J. Cotter, Chair, CUNY Graduate Center
Friday, Nov. 13, 2009
9-11 am
Martin E. Segal Theatre, Panel 7
African Across the Atlantic: Ideas, Identity, and Ideologies
‘Quite High Minded’: African-American Appropriations of Antebellum Concepts of Benevolence and Intellectual Development
Jeffrey Mullins, St. Cloud State University
Matthew J. Hudock, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Delaware: “Africa vs. ‘Africa’: Redefining African Identity in the 19th Century”
Matthew Hudock, University of Delaware
The African American Press and the Parisian Presse Noire: A Transnational Comparison of Racial Ideologies and Protests, 1885-1935
Jennifer Moses, University of Delaware
Commentator: Wilson J. Moses, Pennsylvania State University
C201, Panel 8
Mysticism & the Religion of Democracy in Social Movements
Jane Addams, Horizontal Mysticism & the “Subjective Necessity” to Oppose War
John Pettegrew, Lehigh University
The New Thought Movement and the Emergence of the Feminist Self
Lilian Barger, University of Texas-Dallas
Title—TBD
David Bailey, Michigan State University
Commentator: Matthew Hedstrom, University of Virginia
C202, Panel 9
The Intellectual and Policy Roots of Our Economic Crises
Thorstein Veblen: a Genuine Historical Economist: On the conceptual link between History and Economy in Veblen’s early work
Noam Yuran, Ben Gurion University
The Intellectual Roots of the Financial Crisis
James R. Hackney, Northeastern University
“The Follies of Individualism” Credit Men and the Social Gospel, 1893-1925
David Sellers Smith, Northwestern University
Commentator: Daniel J. Walkowitz, New York University
** Canceled ** — C203, Panel 10 — ** Canceled **
Intellectuals, Culture and Economic Crisis
Politics without Hope: or, History, Post-History, and Alternatives
John Michael, University of Rochester
The Recurrence of Crisis, the Crisis of Recurrence
Paul Smith, George Mason University
On the Road Again: Cinematic Populisms, Then and Now
Sharon Willis, University of Rochester
Commentator: Casey N. Blake, Columbia University
C204, Panel 11
Culture, Thought, and Politics During The Cold War
“Who Is Afraid of Martha Graham?” A new perspective on Martha Graham’s tour to Great Britain in 1954 and its importance for the cultural diplomacy of the Cold War
Camelia Lenart, University at Albany
“The Trade Journal of the Cold War”: The New Leader and the Problem of Liberal Anticommunism
Peter Aigner, CUNY Graduate Center
Archibald MacLeish, Robert Oppenheimer, and “The Conquest of America”
Gary Grieve-Carlson, Lebanon Valley College
Michael Day, Lebanon Valley College
Commentator: David Steigerwald, The Ohio State University
C205, Panel 12
Catholics Looking Inside Out: Catholic Intellectual Contributions to Framing the Cold War
Ought Catholics Be Liberal? John Courtney Murray and John Cogley Face the Cold War
Ray Haberski, Marian College
Aquinas and the World State: Catholic Intellectual Undercurrents of the Early Cold War Movement for World Federalism
Tim Lacy, University of Illinois at Chicago
Edmund A. Walsh, S.J., “Ph.D.,” and the Irony of Intellectual Politics in the Early Cold War, 1945-1952
Patrick McNamara, Diocese of Brooklyn
Commentator: James McCartin, Seton Hall University
1-3 pm
Martin E. Segal Theatre, Panel 13
The Varieties of Conservatism
“A Position That Is Neither Liberal Nor Conservative”: The Goldwin Readers and the Spread of Straussian Political Thought in 1960s America
Benjamin Alpers, University of Oklahoma
Cultural Criticism on the Eve of the Linguistic Turn and Thick Description: Richard Hofstadter’s Analysis of the American Rightwing Extremism for the Fund for the Republic, 1958-1959
Robert Faber, Bradley University
Commentator: Casey N. Blake, Columbia University
C201, Panel 14
The New Left and its Legacies
Student Radicalism and Academic Freedom in the 1960s
Julian Nemeth, Brandeis University
Pornography and the ‘Marketplace of Ideas’: From Feminist Activism to Feminist Legal Theory in the Anti-Pornography Movement
Clara Altman, Brandeis University
Scaring the Shit Out of Honky America: the Weather Underground, the Transnational Global Left and ‘Enlightenment’ Cosmopolitanism
Jeffrey Bloodworth, Gannon University
Commentator: Alice Echols, University of Southern California
C202, Panel 15
Reconciling Religion With Modern Life
John Dewey on Religion and Religious Experience
Marina Ozernov, University of Texas-Dallas
Two Faiths, Christianity and Culture: Religious Response to the Promotion of Culture in the Late-Nineteenth Century United States
Ryan T.A. Swihart, Baruch College /Manhattan College/CUNY
“A Hierarchy of Rights”: Internationalizing the First Amendment in the American Century
Fred Beuttler, Historian’s Office, U.S. House of Representatives
Commentator: David Sehat, Georgia State University
C203, Panel 16
Culture and History
Fashion Theory in U.S. Intellectual Historical Context
Damayanthie Eluwawalage, SUNY-Oneonta
Interpreting a “Hieroglyphic” Civilization: Warren Susman, the 1920s, and the Modernist Tradition
Paul Murphy, Grand Valley State University
The Historical Man: Henry Chapman Mercer and the Transcendent Aesthetics of History
Kathleen Brennan, CUNY Graduate Center
Commentator: Joan Shelley Rubin, University of Rochester
C204, Panel 17
Science, Salvation, and Rationalism: Innovations in Nineteenth-Century American Thought
“Uninteresting truth and interesting falsehood”: Thoreau, Indians, and Nineteenth-Century Religious Liberalism
Daniel Dillard, Florida State University
The ‘Good Minister’: Emerson, Hedge, and Transcendental Religion
Ryan Tobler, University of Chicago
“I Object to the Names Deism and Infidelity”: Theodore Parker and the Boundaries of Christianity in Antebellum America
Benjamin Park, University of Edinburgh
Commentator: Charles Capper, Boston University
C205, Panel 18
Race and Identity Formulations
The Byrd Affair: Black and White Conflict in the Early Days of the New Deal
Lauren Kientz, Michigan State University
“A Process of Culture”: The White Supremacy Campaign and the Christian Educators of Trinity College, 1894-1903
Jennifer Eckel, University of Texas-Austin
The Psychological Turn in the History of American Justice: Segregation and Empathy from Plessy to Brown
Paul A. Dambowic, Pratt Institute
Commentator: K.J. Greene, Thomas Jefferson School of Law
3:30-5:30 pm
Martin E. Segal Theatre, Panel 19
The Psychology of 20th Century America
Moving the Body: Experimenting with Psychological Aesthetics
Susan Lanzoni, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
On Whose Shoulders Does Democracy Rest? Harold Lasswell and the Crisis in the American Social Sciences
Robert Genter, Nassau Community College
The shared liberal orientation of B.F. Skinner and Carl Rogers
Theodore Wisniewski, Simon Fraser University
Commentator: Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Syracuse University
C201, Panel 20
Objectivity, Cultural Criticism and the History of Ideas in the American Academy
Revising the Myth of the Myth of Objectivity in American Historiography
Eileen Cheng, Sarah Lawrence College
Back to the Future: The History of Ideas after the Linguistic and Culture Turns
Daniel Wickberg, University of Texas, Dallas
Masks of Perfect Clarity: A Semiological Analysis of the Cold War Cultural Criticism of Jacques Barzun
W. Colin Church, University of Colorado
Commentator: James Kloppenberg, Harvard University
C202, Panel 21
Linguistic Theory, Philosophy, and Literature
Derrida and US Historiography: Then and now
Andrew Dunstall, Macquarie University
The Presence of the Past: A New Answer to the Riddle of Paul de Man
Gregory Jones-Katz, Husson University
Commentator: Paul Anderson, University of Michigan
C203, Panel 22
To Market, To Market: American Thinkers Confront Twentieth-Century Capitalism
‘Progressive Capitalism’ or ‘Creeping Socialism’?: Henry Wallace, Full Employment and Sixty Million Jobs
Mike O’Connor, Georgia State University
Frederick W. Taylor: The Optimistic Science of Scientific Management
Caitlin Rosenthal, Harvard University
From Entrepreneurship to the Corporation: Samuel Gompers Adjusts
Claire Goldstene, University of Maryland
Commentator: Jennifer Burns, University of Virginia
C204, Panel 23
Forgetting Social Science: Reviving Lost Histories of Social Scientific Thought in America
“Now I am an Imperialist” and Then I was Gone: Fredrick Starr, American Social Science the Tensions of Liberal Internationalism
Brian Foster, Carleton University
Demography’s Darling, Sociology’s Suppressed Memory and the Guise of Culture in Population Science
Karen Foster, Carleton University
“Men are less prone to learn from their victims”: the sociological education of Emily Greene Balch’s cosmopolitanism
Andrew Johnston, Carleton University
Commentator: Daniel Geary, Trinity College (Dublin)
6:30-8:30 pm
Martin E. Segal Theatre
Assessing the Legacy of the 1977 Wingspread Conference
David Hollinger, University of California-Berkeley
Thomas Bender, New York University
Dorothy Ross, Johns Hopkins University
David Hall, Harvard University
Commentator: Charles Capper, Boston University