I’ve decided to no longer blog here. I wish you all continued interesting dialogue and fruitful community.
U.S. Intellectual History Blog
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Robert Greene II
August 2, 2020
U.S. Intellectual History Blog
I’ve decided to no longer blog here. I wish you all continued interesting dialogue and fruitful community.
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I learned a lot from your weekly posts. Best wishes.
Lauren & Colleagues,
I’m sad to see Lauren moving on. She’s been a regular writer with us since February 9, 2009 when she was still a PhD candidate at Michigan State University. At that point she was writing a dissertation directed by David Bailey; I think she was his last student. I’m fairly positive that Lauren had been following the blog and commenting for several months prior to her invitation to be a USIH contributor.
Lauren helped us make the blog a more diverse place—aiding our effort to push back against perceptions of USIH as a field dominated, topically and author-wise, by whites and males. I have enjoyed her posts on teaching, twentieth-century African-American history, gender, and transnationalism.
She always responded to comments on her posts, furthering conversations that helped readers and her. For my part, even when I didn’t comment I always made an effort to read her posts—to learn something outside of my own research. She fostered a readership and networks we would not have had otherwise.
Lauren attended and has been very active in all of our conferences. She lent her artistic eye to our community, helping redesign the blog, in 2010 I think, while we were on Blogger. That redesign stood until the move to WordPress. Lauren was also very active in helping created the Society—commenting and voting on matters from inception to its Constitution, as well as helping on committees.
Lauren—There’s more to say, but I’ll wind things up. I wish you *nothing but the best* in your future endeavors. I’m happy to have been a part of your circle of colleagues for the past four years! – TL
That is a damn shame as your posts were a lovely refreshing break on this blog.
I am sorry, too, that you will no longer be blogging at USIH, and, like Tim, I want to recognize all you have contributed to the blog, above and beyond your many thoughtful posts.
Most especially, I know you have been committed to expanding the scope and range of topics that are typically thought to align with U.S. intellectual history. You have been determined to place questions of gender and race front and center in our field and to foreground the role of African-American intellectuals in American thought. In doing so, you have shown the possibilities–and also, perhaps, highlighted the challenges–of establishing connections between the various academic silos in which we work.
So, thank you for all the good work you have done. Even as you leave the blog, I trust you still find a home in S-USIH. After all, it is “not your grandfather’s historical society”!
Thanks for all your great work and particularly for all of your great questions. Good luck with your book on Juliette Derricotte.
This is very sad to me. I found your posts about black intellectuals, and especially black American women, to be wonderfully refreshing additions to this blog. In fact, your pieces made me a regular visitor here. I hope that your sudden announcement is not indicative of some type of duress. I also hope that the other contributors of this blog will try earnestly to find someone who can offer perspectives similar to your own. Thank you for your work.
I look forward to the development of the blog and the website and the society and a big part of all those efforts will be diversifying who is blogging and what they are blogging about. What we’ve seen so far from a group of over-worked academics who took this up as a labor of love is just a beginning. With the help of the many who read the blog and support the society, this collective endeavor continues to show great promise. I appreciate what the blog has done to create an intellectual home for bloggers and those who comment on the blog. I understand the limits we all have in our training, interests, and writing. And I am consistently impressed by how broadly my colleagues write. Thanks to Lauren for all her work her and with the society.
Thanks for the thoughtful and intellectually open posts, Lauren! You’ll be missed–but have plenty of energy for many other pursuits now.
Last night I reviewed many of your posts and the discussions they sparked over the last few years — a significant contribution, to my mind. Who now will fill the spaces you did so much to enlarge and fill with energy ?