Governance | s-usih.org

PAUL MURPHY, President. A professor of history at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan, Murphy is the author two very well-received books, The New Era: American Thought and Culture in the 1920s (Roman and Littlefield, 2012) and The Rebuke of History: The Southern Agrarians and American Conservative Thought (UNC Press, 2001). His most recent project investigates the efforts of a variety of American intellectuals to promote a “new” humanism as the answer to the nation’s ills in the twentieth century.

LISA SZEFEL, Treasurer. An associate professor of history at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon, Szefel is the author of The Gospel of Beauty in the Progressive Era: Reforming American Verse and Values (Palgrave Macmillian, 2011) and is at work on a intellectual biography of Peter Viereck and his role in shaping modern conservatism. Her research interests center on the role of culture in the development of American values, movements for social change, and political life. Whether popular (soap operas), difficult (modernist poetry), or controversial (conservative intellectuals), my goal is to understand the underpinnings and impact of culture in modern U.S. history.

RAYMOND HABERSKI, JR., Secretary. An associate professor of history at Marian University in Indianapolis, Indiana, Haberski is the author of four books, including most recently God and War: American Civil Religion Since 1945 (Rutgers, 2012). For the 2008-2009 academic year, he was the Fulbright Danish Distinguished Chair in American Studies at the Center for the Study of the Americas (CSA) at the Copenhagen Business School. He is completing a book on Franciscan media for the Academy of American Franciscan History and has begun a project on Catholic thought from the end of the Second World War to the present.

ALLISON PERLMAN, 2013 Conference Chair. An assistant professor in the departments of history and film and media studies at the University of California-Irvine, Perlman is the co-editor of Flow TV: Television in the Age of Convergent Media (Routledge, 2010). Her research focuses on the relationship between media activism, broadcasting policy, and American social movements. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, struggles over broadcasting policy have been critical parts of campaigns for social justice and political reform. As American social movements responded to an increasingly mass-mediated culture, they have tried to mold television to reflect their moral and political beliefs; activist communities have understood that their successes or failures would be tied to the narratives presented in, faces and voices appearing on, and values and perspectives circulating within the televisual public sphere. Of the many strategies deployed to effect change, which have included boycotting offending sponsors and negotiating directly with network executives, has been fights to alter broadcasting policy and law to assure that television could be a partner in the hoped for better future imagined by activist communities.

LORA BURNETT, Chair of Publications. A doctoral student in Humanities/History of Ideas at the University of Texas at Dallas, she has an undergraduate degree in English from Stanford University. Her dissertation will explore an infamous, emblematic but still inadequately understood battle in the so-called ‘Culture Wars’ of the 1980s: the ‘Great Books’ debate at Stanford University.