Second Annual USIH Conference: Program

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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