Panel Construction Assistance for the 2018 S-USIH Conference

30 Thoughts on this Post

1. Hey everyone! I am interested in proposing a panel that examines the 1890s, Populist thought, 1896 election, and/or thought in social movements more generally. If you are interested in putting together a panel on these topics (or any combination of them) please email me at [email protected].

   Thanks!

   • Thanks everyone! I think we have a full panel now. Really looking forward to the conference.

2. I’m interested in doing something on conspiracy theory, based on my book manuscript on antievolutionism and anticommunism. Anyone else interested?

   • Carl I wrote my dissertation on conspiracy in the 1790s and did a post on here about the relationship between working class whites and conspiracies a few months back. Would love to put something together if interested.

   • If you are still interested and still looking for panel members, I might be of assistance- I can offer a case study in conspiracy theory and politics as present in 1925 Boston.

   • I know it’s pretty late to reach out, but I just spotted your post. I’m working on a paper about the way conspiracy theories provide an outlet for electoral minorities trying to make sense of political failure. If you still have room, I’d like to join. Thanks,

     • As far as I know, there is still room- if you wish to form a panel on conspiracy theory and politics, please contact me at [email protected] as soon as possible.

3. Would be interested in doing a panel that is a retrospective of post Cold War/1990s thought on the “new world order.” My focus would be a reassessment of Fukuyama and “The End of History and the Last Man.” If interested email me at [email protected].

4. I’m interested in putting together a panel for the conference. My paper examines the Columbian Catholic Congress at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. It’s the 125th anniversary of the fair this year, and it took place in Chicago – perfect timing and location for the conference!

   I’ll be looking particularly at either Catholic women’s contributions at the congress or participants’ expressions of nationalism.

   I’m open to suggestions for a panel theme. Possibilities might include women and intellectual history, religion, world’s fairs, nationalism, Chicago or Midwestern history, and the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

   If interested in forming a panel, please contact me on Twitter @WilliamCossen or at my website, which is linked to my name above this post.

5. Hi all — I am interested in crafting a panel to further how sports as site of battleground in the culture wars that peddle various cultural and political ideas. This would be a timely panel given then attention placed on sports during the last year as Colin Kaepernick has been blackballed by the NFL, Trump has attacked Black athletes, coaches and players have made more overtly political statements, and the #MeToo movement and Nassar-MSU investigations have shone a light on the toxic-authoritarian masculinity that frames much of big-time college and professional sport. Amidst these stories we also have journalists and fans pushing back against the so-called politicization and feminist attack on sports.

   In my paper, I’m hoping to build on my post on the USIH blog last year (see: https://s-usih.org/2017/01/the-intellectual-coach/ ) that looks at how coaches act as public intellectual or anti-intellectuals. While I am interested in coaches, other papers could address a variety of topics that explore the intellectual histories embedded in sport.

   If interested, please contact me at [email protected]. I will also routinely check for replies in this space.

6. Hi folks, in keeping with this year’s theme, I’d be interested in presenting a paper on Margaret Mead’s inclusion of parapsychology in the American Association for the Advancement of Science while she was president of the organization. Was this move brazenly anti-intellectual, the equivalent of adding “potions” to a chemistry curriculum, or are there other ways to understand it? I could envision a panel with papers about defining the boundary between intellectualism and anti-intellectualism, reason and unreason, facts and “alternative facts,” perhaps with more specific focus on religion, the social sciences, or the 1960s.

   Mead is relevant to a number of other discussions as well, including but not limited to sex and gender, public intellectuals, scholarly partnerships, globalization, and environmentalism. If panels on any of those topics might be able to use a paper on Mead, please let me know! [email protected]

7. Hi All, I’m interested in creating or joining a panel on anti-intellectualism in the 1970s/1980s. My work focuses on conservative women and their rhetoric to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment. I would be especially interested to join up with others who study conservatism during this time period, but I’m excited to hear from anyone else who thinks their work might connect well with mine. Please email me at [email protected]. Thanks!

   • Interested in this as well — I’m thinking about doing a paper on the intellectual history of Lee Greenwood and his song “Born in the U.S.A.” We need more people though!

     • Are the two of you looking for a third panelist? If so, I could work up something that focuses on Nixon’s anti-intellectualism

8. Hi everyone,

   I’m hoping to find a panel on post-1945 public intellectuals which would fit in with my paper on intellectuals and their engagement with the concept of totalitarianism – primarily with a focus on the use of this concept outside of the traditional Cold War framework. Some key figures I’m interested in are Norman Mailer, Eldridge Cleaver, Christopher Hitchens and Paul Berman. Please email me at [email protected]

9. Hi everyone,

   I am interested in organizing a panel on anti-intellectualism and social science intellectuals. I would like to present a paper that focuses on the forced resignation of Prof. W. I. Thomas from the University of Chicago in 1918 for alleged violation of the Mann Act. In keeping with the conference’s theme of anti-intellectualism, I intend to link the takedown of Thomas with the anti-elitism and anti-intellectualism of the early WWI era. I will explore the harmful effects of this action on Thomas personally as well as on the development of sociology at Chicago. I would like to find or organize a panel organized around the social history of intellectuals, particularly American social scientists from the 1910s-1960s. If interested in working together on this type of panel, please email me at [email protected].

10. Hi all!

    I’m interested in creating or joining a panel that explores anti-intellectualism and professionalism at mid-century. In particular, I’m interested in a literary prejudice against social science that is present among a wide range of American novelists in the 1950s and 1960s.

    My paper explores the widespread fear among fiction writers of this period that the novel has been drained of its cultural authority and is slowly becoming replaced by emerging modes of social scientific expertise. Many mid-century novels (by O’Connor, Ellison, Salinger, Roth, Yates, Bellow, Nabokov, McCarthy) feature fictional episodes that display a resentment towards the authority of academic expertise (sociologists, psychoanalysts, statisticians, field workers). In the eyes of these novelists, such credentialed knowledge workers seemed to be taking over the epistemic ground once occupied by fiction writers. I argue that this literary resistance can be located not simply through these authors’ negative portrayal of social scientific experts in fiction, but also through narrative structure of those books–that the _form_ of these novels attempts to validate their author’s epistemic authority. Novelists wanted to protect their traditional turf–as privileged interpreters of American culture, as experts in American manners, as possessing insight into how the ordinary American men and women thought and behaved. Yet this claim–that fiction writers had a certain kind of epistemic advantage over scientists about the nature of interior life–seemed to be threatened by the quantifying and ethnographic urges displayed in mid-century books like _The Organization Man_, _The Lonely Crowd_, and _The Kinsey Report_.

    I’d be open to working with scholars whose expertise touch on any aspect of mid-century literary history, the history of social science, and/or the intellectual history of disciplines and professions.

    Patrick Redding
    [email protected]

    • Oh Patrick, I didn’t read your full comment before posting mine. Let’s talk—I was thinking something more on why’s and how’s of disciplinary history, but might be able to contribute something that would work with your panel if you still need. I will shoot you an email.

    • Thanks all–I’ve now joined a panel!

11. Anyone interested in a panel on disciplinary history?

12. Is anyone interested in a panel on anti-intellectualism in tax policy/reform? I’m thinking post-Carter but it really could extend back to the origin of the income tax, also.

    Thanks!

    • Id be interested to do something on Prop 13 and the tax revolts in California. My work focuses on suburban “quality of life” rhetoric and really dives deep on its intersection with tax policy (and the intellectual dissonance involved). If thats sounds like something that may fit let me know.

      Dan Elkin
      [email protected]

13. I am interested in presenting a paper on the ways in which the Republican Party was described and described itself as “the Party of ideas” in the 1970s-1980s. Daniel Patrick Moynihan assigned the GOP this label in 1980 and I’m interested in what this meant to him as well as other politicians and commentators. My takeaway is that the ideas they promoted in this paper were not really new, but were increasingly framed as such as the New Deal order was cracking.

    • Lawrence, I might be able to join you on a panel about how ideas and politics changed post-1960s.

      I want to present on how Mexican-American liberals broke from a long 20th century tradition of trying to make themselves recognizable to the U.S. state as citizens and, since the 1980s, have instead focused on making themselves recognizable as consumers to transnational corporations as a way to attain power and belonging.

      Would be happy to email you if you’re still looking for panelists.

      AS

14. I know it is cutting it close here, but I am interested in putting a panel together that focuses on Revolutionary America and the emergence of political parties. My work explores the struggle to define the nature of democracy in the years following the Declaration of Independence. The paper I would like to present analyzes changes in political rhetoric and evolving strategies of political mobilization in Pennsylvania between 1783 and 1800. Let me know if you have something that might work well with this and would like to try and get a last-minute panel together: [email protected]

15. I just wanted to offer my services as a commentator for a panel that might need one. I’m going to be at the conference and I’m not yet attached to a panel in that capacity.

    • yes please! I’ll message you now

16. I know this is very late in the game, but still thought to give it a shot on this board.
    Andy Seal and I are putting together a panel around the theme of the “common man” in the 19th century and we need one more panelist.

    Andy and I hope that this panel will explore the ways that gender and race intersect with the 19th century’s various archetypes of “common men,” from settlers to comics to those commoners who could not participate in the myth of the common man.

    I am going to present a paper exploring how the appearance of the two iconic lower class clowns of the antebellum period, the black minstrel and the white frontier jester, reinforced each other and helped shape and discipline the political boundaries of antebellum America around the common white man but to the exclusion of everyone else.

    Andy plans to critique the (still resilient) notion of a stable “agrarian myth” or “yeoman ideal” persisting from Jefferson through the Civil War. Historians still largely presume that antebellum Americans treated property-holding as the necessary foundation for white men’s political liberty and access to property as the guarantee of their political equality, but his paper will show that the centrality of property had already begun to erode by the 1840s, in part due to women’s and African Americans’ turn toward knowledge as an alternative to (landed) property for the purposes of securing both rights and respect.

    We are also thrilled to have Susan Pearson from Northwestern as our panel comment and chair.

    If you are interested in joining our panel, please email me at: [email protected]

17. Friends,

    If needed, I have senior scholar (in addition to Ben’s offer above) who is willing chair or comment on a panel. This scholar could comfortably handle most any 19th or 20th century topic.

    – Tim

    • I know it’s late in the game, but I am finalizing a panel on conspiracy in American politics (see post above). We could use a commentator. Email (ASAP) [email protected]. Thanks!

Comments are closed.