U.S. Intellectual History Blog

S-USIH 2019 Conference Schedule

S-USIH 2019 Conference
November 7-10
The New School
New York, New York
Thursday, November 7

2:00 – 7:00 PM – Check In/Registration

The New School
66 West 12thStreet, 1stFloor

3:00 – 5:00 PM – Behind-the-Scenes tour at the Center for Jewish History

Behind-the-Scenes tour at the Center for Jewish History
Great Hall/Kovno Room
15 west 16th street
NY, NY 10011A pre-welcome welcome to S-USIH 2019 at The Center for Jewish History, just a block from The New School. Enjoy refreshments, learn about CJH’s impressive collections, and catch up with colleagues and friends.

5:00 – 7:00 PM – Opening Reception
65 West 11th Street,
1st Floor Cafe and Courtyard
7:00 – 9:00 PM – Opening Keynote: Martha S. Jones

“The History of Things Unsaid”

66 West 12thStreet, 1stFloor Auditorium

 Friday, November 8

8:00 AM – 6:00 PM

Registration
University Center Lobby
63 Fifth Avenue

Publishers’ Booth and Coffee
University Center, L102
63 Fifth Ave

8:00 AM – 9:00 AMBusiness Meeting

55 West 13th Street, 203 (Hirshon Suite)

9:00 AM – 10:40 AM – Session 1

Multiplying Patriotisms: Jewish Zionists Theorize Group and National Belonging in 20th-Century America

Chair/Comment: Leah Garrett, Hunter College
David Weinfeld, Virginia Commonwealth University, “Cultural Pluralism in America, Religious Pluralism in Israel: Horace Kallen between Judaism and Zionism”
Doug Rossinow, University of Oslo, “Nation, People, Faith, Ethnicity: Zionist Concepts of Jewish Group Identity in 20thCentury America”
Ronnie Grinberg, University of Oklahoma, “’Fountain Pen and Rifle’: Gender and Zionism among the New York Intellectuals

Empire, Race, and Politics in the Postwar United States

Chair/Comment: Celeste Day Moore
Sandy Zipp, Brown University, “Our Imperialisms at Home: Wendell Willkie on Race and the World at Midcentury”
Cotten Seiler, Dickinson College, “’I Wish It Were Possible for You to Be a Little More Technical”: Carleton Coon, Carleton Putnam, and the Postwar Resuscitation of Scientific Racism”
Aarón E. Sanchez, Mountain View College, “Elefantes in the Room: Mexican-American Conservatism in the Twentieth Century”

Concepts for a ‘Post-Industrial’ Society

Chair/Comment: Rachel Louise Moran, University of North Texas
Christian Olaf Christiansen, Aarhus University, Denmark, “Global Inequality: The Sudden Emergence of a New Concept”
David Sessions, Boston College, “What Was ‘Industrial Society’? A Genealogy of a Global Concept, 1930-1960”
Peter Ekman, Cornell University, “Projecting the Urban Future: The New York Metropolitan Region Study and Its Critics, 1956-1968”

Roundtable: The Visual and Material Culture of Power and Protest in the Revolution and Early Republic

Chair: Laura Auricchio, Fordham University
Discussants: Wendy Bellion, University of Delaware
Wendy Bellion, University of Delaware
Jennifer Chuong, Harvard University
Sara Georgini, Massachusetts Historical Society
Craig Bruce Smith, U.S. Army School of Advanced Military Studies

The Venerable Marxist Tradition of Rhetorical Abuse

Chair/Comment: Howard Brick, University of Michigan
Andrew Hartman, Illinois State University, “The Dialectic Is Coming for You”
Peter Kuryla, Belmont University, “’Don’t Stretch Me Over the Rack of the Dialectic, Brother’: Marxism, Marxists, and Tales of Betrayal in American Fiction”
Charmion E. Gustke, Belmont University, “’Feeling Ran High in Homestead’: Big Steel and the Radical Potential of a Queer Marxism”

The Postwar Study of “Social Problems”: Politics, Power, and Discipline

Chair / Comment: Jefferson Pooley, Muhlenberg College
Leah Gordon, Amherst College/Brandeis University, “From Discrimination as System to Systemic Racism: Racial Discrimination and the Social Science of Social Problems”
Andrew Jewett, Boston College, “From Socialization to Skills: Education, Policy, and the U.S. Social Sciences”
Joy Rohde, University of Michigan, “From a Global Social Problem to an Instrument of State Power: How Social Science Has Known War”

11:00 AM – 12:40 PM – Session 2

Roundtable:Intellectual History as Moral Inquiry

Chair: Ben Alpers, University of Oklahoma
Discussants:
Ben Alpers, University of Oklahoma
Lora Burnett, Collin College
George Cotkin, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo
Jonathan Scott Holloway, Northwestern
Amy Kittelstrom, California State University, Sonoma

Ideas in the Early Republic

Chair/Comment: Sara Georgini, Massachusetts Historical Society
Ethan Goodnight, Harvard University, “’The Disadvantages of Education”: Jarena Lee, the AME Church, and Respectability Politics and Protest”
Max Matherne, The University of Tennessee, “Inventing Andrew Jackson: Radical Democrats and the Cultural Construction of a President, 1815-1828”
Mark Power Smith, Arizona State University, “Popular Sovereignty and Natural Rights in Jacksonian Political Thought, 1841-1861”

Rethinking Liberalism in Postindustrial America

Chair/Comment: Brent Cebul, University of Pennsylvania
Jacqueline Brandon, Princeton University, “’Winning in the World Economy’: New Democrats and the Triumph of Free Trade”
Charles Petersen, Harvard University, “The Meritocratic State: Jerry Brown, Silicon Valley, and the California School of Neoliberalism, 1974-1984”
Dylan Gottlieb, Princeton University, “Yuppies: Rethinking Liberalism in the Postindustrial Age”

Capitalism, Socialism, and Utopia

Chair/Comment: Julia Ott, The New School
James Livingston, Rutgers University “Our Desire Is Not Nameable”
Jonathan Levy, University of Chicago, “The Socialization of Investment”
Bruce Robbins, Columbia University, “Single? Great? Collective? Fredric Jameson’s World History”

Pragmatism and Cultural Pluralism in The United States (Solicited by SAAP)

Chair/Comment: Mark Sanders, University of North Carolina, Charlotte
Marilyn Fischer, University of Dayton: “When ‘American’ was racially coded: Jane Addams Pushes Back”
Jacoby A. Carter, Howard University: “Alain Locke’s Critical Pragmatist Philosophy of Ethnic Race”
Jose Orosco, Oregon State University: “Toppling the Melting Pot: Race, Immigration, and Multicultural Democracy”

1:00 – 2:00 PM – Live Podcast: Past/Present

55 West 13th Street, 202 (Theresa Lang Center)

Nicole Hemmer, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, and Neil J. Young
interviewing Emily Bazelon, author of
Charged: The New Movement to Transform American Prosecution and End Mass Incarceration

2:15 – 3:45 PM – Plenary Roundtable: Publishing Intellectual History

66 West 12th Street, 106

Chair: Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, The New School

Discussants:
Alexander Star, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Timothy Mennel, University of Chicago Press
Nicole Hemmer, The Washington Post
Yoni Appelbaum, The Atlantic
Guy Emerson Mount, Black Perspectives
Katherine Flynn, Kneerim & Williams

4:00 – 5:00 PM – Live Podcast: Sexing History

55 West 13th Street, 203

Gill Frank and Lauren Gutterman present an intellectual history of anti-rape activism, including an exclusive interview with Susan Brownmiller

4:05 – 5:45 PM – Session 3

Roundtable: Reparations as Global Praxis
(sponsored by AAIHS)

Chair: Guy Emerson Mount, Auburn University
Discussants:
Guy Emerson Mount, Auburn University
Michael Ralph, New York University
Crystal Smith, National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America

The Culture Wars

Chair/comment: Neil J. Young, Independent Scholar
Sean Dempsey, Loyola Marymount University, “Catholic Radicalism and Liberation Theology in 1980s Los Angeles”
Hettie V. Williams, Monmouth University, “’We Supported Each Other’: Black Intellectuals Confronting the ‘Stigma’ of Homosexuality and the AIDS Epidemic in the 1980s”
Rachel Louise Moran, University of North Texas, “In the Formative Stages: Inventing Post-Abortion Syndrome in the 1980s”

Eras of Good and Bad Feelings

Chair/Comment: Robert Pierce Forbes, Southern Connecticut State University
Asaf Almog, University of Virginia, “’It Follows that they are in a Purely Republican Government Born Free’: The Missouri Crisis and the Rapid Transformation of Moderate Antislavery Rhetoric in New England”
Thomas Balcerski, Eastern Connecticut State University, “Making the Monroe Doctrine: John Quincy Adams, John C. Calhoun, and the Birth of Proslavery Nationalism”
Wendy Wong Schirmer, Temple University, “Good and Bad Feelings, Monroe’s National Tours, and U.S. Foreign Relations”
Eran Zelnik, California State University, Chico, “The Era of NationalistFeelings”

Roundtable:The End of Liberalism
Chair: Kyle Williams, Rutgers University
Discussants:
Molly Worthen, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Matthew Sitman, Commonweal
Clifton Granby, Yale Divinity School
Casey Nelson Blake, Columbia University
Kyle Williams, Rutgers University

Political Modernity and the Crisis of Postwar Liberalism

Chair: George Cotkin, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo
Drew Maciag, Independent Scholar, “The Cultural Contradictions of Camelot”
David Lee, Temple University “The New Deal in the New Frontier: Planning Cold War Politics in the 1960s”
Scott Kamen, University of Toledo, “A Complicated turn to the Left: Postwar Liberals, New Left Radicals, and Political Change in the Twilight of the Long 1960s”
Comment: Anne Kornhauser, City College of New York

Saturday, November 9

8:00 AM – 8:00 PM

Registration, Publishers’ Booth, and Coffee
University Center
63 Fifth Avenue, L102

9:00 AM – 10:40 AM – Session 4

Intellectual Histories of the Modern American Family

Chair: Rebecca Davis, University of Delaware
Saniya Lee Ghanoui, University of Illinois, “Family Life Education: The Transition of Sex Instruction from the Home to the School, 1920s-1950s”
William Schultz, Princeton University, “Focusing on the Family: James Dobson’s Critique of Conformity”
Marga Vicedo, University of Toronto, “Intelligent Love: Contesting a Mother’s Role in the Modern American Family”

Book Roundtable: How to Hide an Empire, by Daniel Immerwahr (solicited by SAAP)

Chair: Mark Edwards, Spring Arbor University
Discussants:
Christopher McKnight Nichols, Oregon State University
Amy Offner, University of Pennsylvania
Alvita Akiboh, University of Michigan
Sarah Miller-Davenport, University of Sheffield
Author’s response: Daniel Immerwahr, Northwestern University

Roundtable:  Novel History: Ideas in Literature and the Historical Style

Chair: Lilian Calles Barger, Independent Scholar
Discussants:
Anthony Chaney, University of North Texas – Dallas
Peter Kuryla, Belmont University
Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn, Syracuse University
Aaron Sachs, Cornell University

History-Making and Nation-Making in the Early American Republic

Chair/Comment: Steven Conn, Miami University of Ohio
Eileen Ka-May Cheng, Sarah Lawrence College, “Plagiarizing the Nation: Early National Historians and the Loyalist Sources of American Identity”
Alea Henle, Miami Univesity of Ohio, “’Plan for Providing Materials for History’: Historical Society Collection Priorities, 1791-1850”
Derek O’Leary, University of California, Berkeley, “Repatriating the American Past”

Ideas of Labor as a Tool of Power and Reform

Chair/Comment: Adam Malka, University of Oklahoma
Karen Zipf, East Carolina Univeristy, “’Black Knight’: Patriarchal Strategies of a Farm Labor Crew Boss in the Eastern Migrant Stream”
Alexander Finkelstein, University of Oklahoma, “Carceral Rehabilitation’s Discourses: Environmentalist Ideology and Breadwinner Industrialism”
Carolyn A. Levy, Pennsylvania State University, “The Representative and Guardian of Her Sex: Analyzing the Roles of Prison Matrons in Nineteenth-Century America”

Problems, Ages, Ideas: David Brion Davis and Intellectual History

Chair: Thomas Bender, New York University
Discussants: Christopher L. Brown, Columbia University
Leslie Butler, Dartmouth
Caleb McDaniel, Rice University
Manisha Sinha, University of Connecticut
Amy Dru Stanley, University of Chicago

10:00 AM – 11:00 AM – Live Podcast: MindPop

66 West 12th Street, 510

David Sehat interviews Jedidiah Purdy,
Columbia University William S. Benecke Professor of Law

11:00 AM – Noon: – Live Podcast: Exiles on 12thStreet

55 West 13th Street, 203 (Hirshon Suite)

Claire Bond Potter in conversation with John Di Domenico, Helaine Olen, and David Greenberg, in this new podcast of art and ideas by and for a new generation of New York Intellectuals

11:00 – 12:30 PM – Session 5

Roundtable:New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition(solicited by AAIHS)

Chair: Guy Emerson Mount, Auburn University
Discussants:
Christopher Cameron, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Shaun Armstead, Rutgers University
David Weinfeld, Virginia Commonwealth University
A . Lavelle Porter, New York City College of Technology, CUNY

Intellectual Roots of 20thCentury Progressives

Chair: Kristopher Burrell, Hostos Community College, CUNY
Lewis Josef Robert D’Avigdor, Cornell University, “Harold Cruse’s Aesthetic Theory of American Negritude and the culture concept in African American intellectual thought”
Carl Pederson, Center for the Study of the Americas, Copenhagen Business School, “The World House: Martin Luther King and the Tragedy of US Foreign Policy”
Julian E. Zelizer, Princeton University, “The Intellectual and Theological Roots of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Progressive Politics, 1945-1963”
David Ostlund, Södertörn University, Sweden, “Alain Locke, intercultural education and ‘reciprocity’: The ideas of cultural pluralism pragmatically tested”
Comment: Nicole Hemmer, Columbia University

The Politics of Backlash and Reaction

Chair/Comment: Seth Blumenthal, Boston University
Lawrence Glickman, Cornell University, “Toward an Intellectual History of Backlashes”
Bobby Cervantes, University of Kansas, “The 1968 Poor People’s Campaign and the Making of American Poverty”
Lauren Lassabe, The University of Southern Mississippi, “Reaction on the Right: Conservative Students in the Era of the New Left, 1967-1973”
Oz Frankel, The New School, “Historical Consciousness in the Age of Donald Trump”

The Anarchist Imagination in Postwar American Art, Social Thought and Politics

Chair: Casey Nelson Blake, Columbia University
Valerie Hellstein, Independent Scholar, “Anarchism at the Club: Abstract Expressionism’s Mutual Aid”
Jason Resnikoff, Columbia University, “Postwar Post-Scarcity: Murray Bookchin, Anarchism, and the Degradation of Labor”
Benjamin Serby, Columbia University, “The ‘Realization of Innocence’: Gay Liberation and Anarchism in the Postwar United States”
Comment: Robert Genter, Nassau Community College

Small-Town Culture Wars of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Chair/Comment: Andrea L. Turpin, Baylor University
Andrew Klumpp, Southern Methodist University, “Becoming Americans: Small Town Immigrants and Assimilation in the Midwest, 1870-1900”
David Mislin, Temple University, “Failure to Thrive: Religious Liberalism in Small Town U.S.A. in the Mid-Twentieth Century”
Katherine Rye Jewell, Fitchburg State University, “College Towns and Cultural Authenticity: College Radio and Music Networks in the 1980s”

In Whose Interest: Immigration, Intervention, and the Nuclear Menace at the End of the Cold War

Chair: Anne Kornhauser, City College of New York
Carly Goodman, Independent Scholar, “Making Immigration Restriction Great Again: FAIR Advanced White Supremacy through Immigration Policy in the 1980s”
Henry Maar, Independent Scholar: “From the Streets to the Pulpit: The Catholic Arms Race”
Brian Mueller, Independent Scholar: “Bearing Witness: Religious Activists Confront Reagan’s Secret Wars in Central America”

12:40 PM – 2:00 PM – President’s Lunch, Awards and Recognitions

55 West 13th Street, 202 (Theresa Lang)

Plenary Roundtable: Public History

Moderator: Amanda Bellows, The New School
Discussants:
Valerie Paley, Chief Historian of the New York Historical Society
Kim Gilmore, Senior Historian at The History Channel
Jim Basker, President, The Gilder Lehrman Institute

3:00 PM – 4:00 PM – Live Podcast: Trotsky and the Wild Orchids

66 West 12th Street, 510

Andrew Hartman and Raymond J. Haberski interview Kimberly Phillips-Fein, author of FEAR CITY: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics
2:30 – 4:10 PM – Session 6

Book Roundtable: The Lions’ Den: Zionism and the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky, by Susan Linfield

Chair: David Greenberg, Rutgers University
Tony Michels, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Donna Robinson Divine, Smith College
Adam Kirsch, The Wall Street Journaland Tablet Magazine
Michael Walzer, Institute for Advanced Study
Author’s Response: Susan Linfield, New York University

Race, Politics, and Education in America

Chair/Comment:  Anthony Chaney, University of North Texas at Dallas
Bryn Upton, McDaniel College, “Power, Privilege, and Citizenship in American Education”
Shawn Varghese, The University of Texas at Dallas, “If the Bible and Blackness Bump Heads, Blackness Must Go’: Black Evangelicals vs. White Theology in the Pursuit for Social Change at the National Black Evangelical Association”
Danielle N. Stubbe, Vanderbilt University, “Patrons and Politics of the Culture Concept: Postwar Disciplinary Myth-Making in the History of Anthropology”

Roundtable: Arendt’s Representations: Philosophy, Politics, Poetics

Chair: Samantha Hill, Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College
Participants:
Rebecca Brenner Graham, American University
Gautham Rao, American University
Evan Goldstein, Yale University
Zachary Kopin, University of Michigan

Big Sky: The Heavens, Technology, and Higher Meaning

Chair/Comment: Benjamin Lazier, Reed College
Courtney Bender, Columbia University, “Faith shines equal / the Cold War secular sublime”
Christopher G. White, Vassar College, “J.W. Dunne, Predictive Dreams and Flight through Space and Time”
Trent MacNamara, Texas A&M University, “Popular Ideas about the Heavens in America”

The Great Abolitionism: The Survival of Romantic Reform in the Nineteenth Century

Chair/Comment:  Leslie Butler, Dartmouth University
Sean Griffin, Brooklyn College, “’Those Who Are Greater Slaves Than Themselves’: The Transatlantic Origins of Anti-Abolitionism in Radical Labor Movement Ideology”
Daniel Joslyn, New York University, “Ernest Crosby, William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolitionist Legacy”
Brigitte Koenig, Seton Hall University, “’Has Freedom Gender?’: The Politics of Sex in American Anarchism”
Peter Wirzbicki, Princeton University, “Elisha Mulford and the Legacies of Antislavery Nationalism”

Dread and Desire: The Sexual Politics of Dystopian and Utopian Thinking Since the Second World War

Chair/Comment:  Martin Woessner, The City College of New York
Clay Matlin, School of Visual Arts, “’[A]n open, vulnerable commitment to life’: New York Jewish Intellectuals and the Postwar World”
Myra Rosa, The City College of New York, “Women’s Bodies as Political Instruments: The Handmaid’s Taleand Second-Wave Feminism”
Ron Haas, Texas State University, “Sexual Liberalism, Sexual Utopianism, and the American Incel Revolt”

4:15 – 5:15 – Plenary: A Conversation with Ally Sheedy
Ally Sheedy, in conversation with Lora Burnett
Audience Q&A to follow

55 West 13th Street, 202 (Theresa Lang)

5:30 PM – 6:30 PM – Reception
Sponsored by the New School for Social Research Admissions Office

University Center
63 Fifth Ave, 102/103

6:30 PM – 8:00 PM – Keynote: Claire Bond Potter
“Does Social Media Have an Intellectual History? Defining the Digital Public Sphere”

66 West 12th Street, 106

Sunday, November 10

9 :00 AM – 10 :40 AM – Session 7

American Internationalism and National Identity from the 1930s to the 1970s

Chair: Clara Mattei, The New School
Christopher McKnight Nichols, Oregon State University, “Fortress America and Binding Internationalism, 1930s to 1950s”
Christopher Dietrich, Fordham University, “’Emperor Swat’: Global Oil and the Peril of Nationalism after World War II”
Jennifer Mittelstadt, Rutgers University, “Right-wing Anti-Internationalism and the Cold War”
Michael Koncewicz, Tamiment Library, New York University, “’We’re Not Against America’: The Vietnam Moratorium Committee and a New Patriotic Antiwar Politics”

Cold War Internationalism

Chair/Comment:  Ted Miller, Northeastern University
Matthew Linton, Council of Graduate Schools / Independent Scholar, “From the Battlefield to the Conference Table: The Institute of Pacific Relations and the Danger of Misunderstanding After the Peace of Versailles”
Diana Lemberg, Lingnan University, Hong Kong, “Language Training and the Liberal Cold War, 1947-1963”
Anthony Smith, University of Dayton, “The Cultural Front and Neorealism: Progressive Hollywood’s Italian Connections”

Ultimate Questions in 20th-Century Thought

Chair/Comment:  Joel Isaac, University of Chicago
Jamie Cohen-Cole, George Washington University, “Small Beginnings: Finding the answers to ultimate questions in children’s everyday lives”
Michael Kimmage, The Catholic University of America, “The Ultimate Questions of Alexander Schmeman”
Mark Greif, Stanford University, “‘What if the End Doesn’t Come?’: Post- Thinking and the Twentieth Century’s Uneven Endings”
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, University of Wisconsin – Madison, “Ultimate Questions, Provisional Answers”

Book Roundtable: The Instrumental University: Education in Service of the National Agenda, by Ethan Schrum

Chair: Tim Lacy, University of Illinois College of Medicine
Discussants:
Howard Brick, University of Michigan
Jennifer Burns, Stanford University
Hunter Heyck, University of Oklahoma
Julie Reuben, Harvard University
Author’s Response: Ethan Schrum, Azusa Pacific University

Greenwich Village is Dead: Ideological and Artistic Trends in a Manhattan Neighborhood

Chair: Julia Foulkes, The New School
Brian Tochterman, Northland College, “Lost in the Village: New York City through the eyes of Irving Howe and Lionel Abel”
Hillary E. Miller, Queens College, “Vinnette Carroll, Langston Hughes, and the Creation of the Gospel-Song Play”
Stephen Petrus, La Guardia Community College, “No Longer the ‘Underground’: The Village Voiceand Experimental Drama and Independent Film in the 1950s and 60s”

Thinking Transnationally about Black Intellectual History (solicited by AAIHS)

Russell Rickford, Cornell University, “A Proxy Africa: African Americans and Guyana in the 1970s”
Ashley Finigan, University of Chicago, “European Tour with a Purpose: The travel mission of the National Council of Negro Women”
Amanda Joyce Hall, Yale University, “Internationalizing Black Consciousness: The Foreign Policy of the Black Consciousness Movement and the Global Struggle Against South African Apartheid, c. 1971-1976”

11:00 AM – 12:40 PM – Session 8

Roundtable: What Is the Fight? The Academy and Jobs

Chair: Raymond J. Haberski, The Institute for American Thought, IUPUI
Discussants:
Emily Dufton, George Washington University Documentary Center
Daniel Bessner, University of Washington
Claire Bond Potter, The New School
Raymond J. Haberski. The Institute for American Thought, IUPUI

Transatlantic Crises of Democracy and Intellectual Expertise

Chair: Sophia Rosenfeld, University of Pennsylvania
Emily J. Levine, Stanford University, “Academic Freedom – the Price for Influence?”
Terence Renaud, Yale University, “Insider Intellectual History”
Gene Zubovich, University of Toronto, “Religion, Democratic Practice, and Church-State Relations in the 1940s United States”
Comment: Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, University of Wisconsin – Madison

Education for Equality: Visions and Limits of School Reform in the Twentieth Century

Chair/Comment: Jeanne Theoharis, Brooklyn College
Ashley Dennis, Northwestern University, “’True to Life’ Literature: Charlemae Hill Rollins’s Crusade to Improve Education through Anti-Racist Children’s Books”
Brian Jones, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, “A Black University? Reform and Revolution at Tuskegee Institute, 1965-1968”
Michael Glass, Princeton University, “Stopping Robin Hood: The Opponents of School Finance Reform in 1970s New York”
Esther Cyna, Columbia University, “Equal Educational Opportunities: Struggles to Define the Right to Education in North Carolina (1987-1997)”

The Crisis of Humanism in the Twentieth Century

Chair/Comment: Amy Kittelstrom, California State University, Sonoma
Paul Murphy, Grand Valley State University, “The Ambiguous Project of Conservative Humanists in the Early Twentieth Century”
Patrick Redding, Manhattanville College, “What the Numbers Don’t Show: American Fiction and the Social Sciences as Epistemic Rivals, 1940-1970”
Dustin Abnet, California State University, Fullerton, “Humanism in a Technocratic Age: The Competing Visions of Isaac Asimov and Kurt Vonnegut Jr.”

Environmental Activism on a Continuum: Wilderness, City, Place

Chair: Jason M. Kelly, Arts and Humanities Institute, IUPUI
John Linstrom, New York University, “Simon Pokagon and the Columbian ‘Rebuke’ of the Queen of the Woods
Daniel Rinn, University of Rochester, “Jeanne Robert Foster: Naturalism in the Wilderness and City”
Rohma Khan, University of Rochester, “Fare Share: Cabs, Labor, and Environment in the City”

The Protest of Business and the Business of Protest

Chair: Guy Ortolano, New York University
Jessica Ann Levy, Princeton University, “From Black Power to Black Empowerment: The Business of Incorporating Struggle”
Grace Davie, Queens College, CUNY, “Labor Union Corporate Campaigns in the United States: Operationalizing Power Structure Analysis in the Era of Neoliberal Restructuring”
Abram Van Lengen, Washington University, “Perry Miller’s Protest Against America”
Gayle Rogers, University of Pittsburgh, “The Invention of Speculative Manias”