USIH 3.0: Keynote and Plenary Sessions

[Updated: 5/14/2010]

The program for the third annual U.S. Intellectual History Conference (USIH3) will be highlighted by the following keynote speaker and plenary sessions:

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Keynote: James Kloppenberg, the Charles Warren Professor of American History at Harvard University.
Friday, Oct. 22, 1:30-3:00 p.m.

Professor Kloppenberg specializes in American and European intellectual history. For his keynote, Kloppenberg will be presenting from his book on the thought of Barack Obama, forthcoming from Princeton University Press.He has written about the rise and fall of social democracy in Europe and America; eighteenth-century American politics and ideas; the career of the American philosophy of pragmatism from the late nineteenth to the twenty-first century; European interpretations of American culture from Tocqueville through Weber; and the relation between contemporary critical theory and historical writing.

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Plenary: Intellectual History for What?
Friday, Oct. 22, 7-9 p.m.

George Cotkin
Rochelle Gurstein
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn
Wilfred McClay
David Steigerwald
Casey Nelson Blake

This plenary session will raise a number of questions involving the relationship between intellectual history and less specialized audiences and genres of expression, including: intellectual history and social/cultural criticism; intellectual history as a resource for moral reflection and edification; writing for, teaching, and speaking to generalist audiences; and the ambiguous position of intellectual history within the research university.

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Plenary: Renewing Black Intellectual History
Thursday, Oct 21, 6-8 p.m.

The following four speakers are confirmed:

Adolph Reed, Jr.
Kenneth W. Warren
Dean E. Robinson
Touré F. Reed

This plenary that will consist of several contributors to an exciting new anthology, Renewing Black Intellectual History: The Ideological and Material Foundations of African American Thought. "This book maps the changing conditions of black political practice and experience from Emancipation to Obama with excursions into the Jim Crow era, Black Power radicalism, and the Reagan revolt. Here are essays, classic and new, that define historically and conceptually discrete problems affecting black Americans as these problems have been shaped by both politics and scholarly fashion. A key goal of the book is to come to terms with the changing terrain of American life in view of major Civil Rights court decisions and legislation."