Dec 5 – The President That Is Not One 🗓
“The President That Is Not One”
Prof. Donald E. Pease
December 5, 2017, 10-12 a.m., P 6 (Philosophicum)
For more information see the poster.
Prof. Donald E. Pease
Nov 23 – Annual Dietz Memorial Lecture 🗓
Annual Dietz Memorial Lecture
November 23, 2017, 12-2 p.m., P 5 (Philosophicum)
Lecture
Jerry Ellis: “The Trail Leads Home”
Awards
Obama Dissertation Prize
Hans Galinsky Memorial Prize
For more information see the Dietz Lecture flyer.
July 11 – The Varieties of American Patriotism: Domestic Conflict over U.S. Foreign Policy from Munich to Korea 🗓
Michaela Hoenicke Moore (University of Iowa)
The Varieties of American Patriotism: Domestic Conflict over U.S. Foreign Policy from Munich to Korea
July 11, 2017, 4-6 p.m., SB II 01-531
According to conventional understanding World War Two brought about an internationalist consensus at home yielding widespread domestic support for the country’s subsequent global, military role. A closer examination of how Americans responded to the dramatic events at mid-century, however, reveals a more complex picture. Ordinary citizens vigorously participated not only in the great debate preceding Pearl Harbor but also weighed in on public controversies of the early Cold War. These views at the grassroots level reveal a continuous practice of patriotic dissent and a deep reservoir of alternative visions for America’s role in the world.
Michaela Hoenicke Moore is Associate Professor of History at the University of Iowa. She has published three books, including a study on how Americans understood the Third Reich, entitled Know Your Enemy: The American Debate on Nazism, 1933-45 (Cambridge University Press, 2010) which won a national award for the best book in diplomatic history written by a woman. She is currently working on a project exploring “The Varieties of American Patriotism” and US foreign policy debates since the 1930s.
July 12 – The Trump Presidency in Historical Perspective: Does America’s Political System Still Work? 🗓
The Department of Political Science cordially invites to a guest lecture by
Sean Theriault (University of Texas, Austin)
“The Trump Presidency in Historical Perspective: Does America’s Political System Still Work?”
July 12, 2017, 10-12 a.m., P3 (Philosophicum)
Download the flyer here.
July 11 – Surveying American Late Modernism: Partisan Review and the Cultural Politics of the Questionnaire 🗓
Ian Afflerbach (Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta)
July 11, 2017, 2-4 p.m., P 208
In 1939, Philip Rahv and William Phillips, editors of Partisan Review, attempted to map “The Situation in American Writing” by sending a questionnaire to some of the nation’s most accomplished authors and critics: from Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, and John Dos Passos, to Lionel Trilling, Allen Tate, and R. P. Blackmur. By unpacking the eclectic archive of published (and unpublished) responses to this survey, my essay shows how the Partisan Review’s 1939 questionnaire illustrates the de ning concerns of an American late modernism emerging in the United States during the interwar period. I begin by relating how the questionnaire rose to prominence alongside modernism, through developments in mass print culture. I show how Partisan Review’s questionnaire performs a mode of cultural politics that I call “democratic dissensus,” a process of ironic negation, dispute, and re ection that was central to the magazine’s cultural project from the 1930s through the 1950s. Drawing upon periodical studies, material culture studies, and the emerging eld of late modernist studies, I position the democratic dispute engineered by Partisan Review as a signal moment not only in the magazine’s history, but in periodizing narratives about American modernism.
Ian Afflerbach will begin as Assistant Professor of American Literature at the University of North Georgia in Fall 2017.
June 26 – The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint Domingue and British Jamaica, 1748-1788
Trevor Burnard (The University of Melbourne, Australia)
June 26, 2017, 6 p.m., Fakultätssaal (Philosophicum)
Jamaica and Saint Domingue were two wildly successful but socially monstrous slave societies. In the years between 1748 and 1788 these societies—based upon a plantation complex in which African labourers were brought to the Caribbean to produce luxury commodities originally developed in Asia for a European market—reached an apogee of sorts in the Greater Antilles. Jamaica and Saint Domingue came close to perfecting a form of economic organisation that operated on a global scale that provided the owners of capital (human and otherwise) with vast amounts of money and considerable geopolitical clout. These were regions that exempli ed the complex forces of early modern imperialism, forces that helped make colonialism a truly global phenomenon.
This talk explores these two socities at the height of their powers. It looks at how their plantation systems developed and at the social and cultural forms that the plantation complex in its most developed and modern form spawned. In particular, it looks at how these societies created new forms of belonging based on race and on shared values in their elites of “whiteness.” White colonial residents of Jamaica and Saint Domingue established individualistic behaviours that might be considered egalitarian if these societies had not been so dependent upon enslaved labourers for their wealth.
Trevor Burnard is Head of School and Professor of History at the School of Historical & Philosophical Studies (SHAPS) at The University of Melbourne, Australia.