Countdown to Conference: Interview with Keynote Claire Potter

(1) HOW HAS LIVING AND WORKING IN NEW YORK CITY, MORE SPECIFICALLY AT THE NEW SCHOOL, SHAPED YOU AS A SCHOLAR?

I attended graduate school in New York and then spent twenty years teaching at Wesleyan University in central Connecticut. These years were intellectually stimulating, I had wonderful colleagues, and thanks to Richard Ohmann and Elizabeth Traub, I had the opportunity to engage cultural studies as a project. But these years were also oddly constricting because traditional institutions assess writing and scholarship by narrow standards. Major cities like New York have long traditions of public engagement outside the academy.

At the New School, people like Hannah Arendt wrote for The New Yorker. You can have high scholarly standards and also have a good appreciation of what it means to get out there in public. I have many colleagues who pivot between worlds, and The New School encourages our participation in broader media. I wrote a popular blog for my last five years at Wesleyan, and The Chronicle of Higher Education took it on as a project, but nobody mentioned it to me except when they were offended. At The New School, if you publish a piece in the mainstream, or you are on television, then you hear from your dean, colleagues, and the provost – the President of The New School might tweet it.

Ultimately, I made some strides toward being the person I wanted to be in Connecticut but was able to realize that in New York.

(2) LAST YEAR, YOU CO-PUBLISHED A FANTASTIC EDITED COLLECTION OF ESSAYS ON THE HAMILTON MUSICAL. WHAT DO YOU HOPE FANS OF THE SHOW TAKE AWAY FROM THAT BOOK?

Shout out here to my collaborator Renee Romano of Oberlin, who had the idea in the first place, and to Leslie Mitchner, the now-retired editor at Rutgers University Press. What Renee noticed was that a wide range of people viewed Hamilton as a jumping-off point for learning more about early American history. This is like what you see in the classroom: students realizing they were interested in something. But in this case, the “students” were sometimes as young as ten and sometimes older than me. They were hungry to know more, so we wanted to feed that. But we didn’t want to do it uncritically. We knew that people were using Hamilton in the classroom, so as teachers we knew they might want a collection to teach. We wanted Hamilton fans to know that the musical raised intellectual questions about how we remember the American past, how it is represented, and why we choose certain representations over others. Ideally people finish reading our book more self-aware of what they saw and listened to, aware that they are part of a broader dialogue. This is profoundly important in an age in which no racist statement that Trump makes seems too extreme for the GOP.

(3) HOW DO YOU VIEW USIH’S PLACE IN THE HISTORY FIELD?

Intellectual history has given me basic frameworks of how to think about political ideology, the body, and how different media technologies affect how people think. I have been delighted to follow the progress of S-USIH partially because it was begun by younger scholars who defined their project and promoted it, in a way that was connected to intellectual history as it was. These younger people didn’t want to tear down the house, they wanted to remodel it to include a range of topics that had not been part the intellectual history project, and they actively recruited scholars like the late Leo Ribuffo, in contrast to our contemporary “in your face” politics of defining the new against something it seeks to displace. Many of these scholars are working in recent American history, and by doing so they are outlining what the history of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s will consider.

(4) YOUR TWITTER HANDLE IS CURRENTLY “TENURED RADICAL.” FOR YOU, HOW DOES YOUR IDENTITY BEING TENURED INTERSECT WITH YOUR IDENTITY BEING RADICAL? WHAT DOES EACH MEAN TO YOU?

This is a hilarious question, and I’m so glad you asked. “Tenured Radical” is an oxymoron because nothing is less radical than the tenure system. But when Twitter trolls go after me, this is something they target. In the 1980s, conservatives began to target academics as “tenured radicals,” a radical left that had infiltrated universities and was indoctrinating youth with their horrid ideas. It’s a formulation that exists today, but now it’s part of the wallpaper, and we hardly notice it. In 1990, a critic named Roger Kimball published a book entitled Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted Our Higher Education, which was one of the opening salvos of the 1990s Culture Wars. I thought it was a great blog title because it is, of course, an oxymoron: there is nothing lessradical than the tenure system, and being a tenured gatekeeper is an invitation to discipline other people in horrible ways. I grabbed the Gmail account, and when I joined Twitter in 2009, the handle was still available – after all, it was my brand.

Most of my younger critics don’t realize that the handle is a joke, which is an excellent argument for why we need more intellectual history.

(5) HOW HAVE YOU HANDLED SOCIAL MEDIA CONTROVERSY, AND WHAT IF ANY LESSONS HAVE YOU LEARNED?

I’ve sometimes handled social media controversy poorly, and sometimes well. When I send a tweet, I can sometimes predict when there will be powerful blowback — and if I think it’s important, I hit send anyway. And unless I’ve genuinely hurt someone, controversy on Twitter doesn’t matter. It’s useful to distinguish when you’re sending a tweet in reactive mode because the controversy will be pointless. But when the tweet might make a difference in signaling to others that their groupthink is nonsense, that’s useful.

I cannot speak highly enough of Twitter Block Chain, which allows you to remove whole networks early. It also allows you to identify the instigators: who put your tweet into their grievance networks? In one instance I learned that it was an actual friend, who meant no harm. Another time, I learned what I’d suspected: two people who market themselves as academic “consultants” to job seekers were targeting me to bounce their followers and seek new business. One received a letter from my lawyer, and both were blocked.

Also, Twitter is about the group, and the further you move from the original tweet, the more you’re responding to a tweet about a tweet about a tweet. By day two, people have no idea what the original encounter was. Think before you jump into a Twitterstorm: it’s a form of bullying, and if someone should be rebuked, you can write to them. Don’t perform the rebuke for your friends.

(6) FOR THE DOCTORAL STUDENTS AT OUR CONFERENCE, WHAT ADVICE CAN YOU SHARE REGARDING THE DISSERTATION, AND WHAT WAS YOUR OWN DISSERTATION PROCESS LIKE?

My dissertation process was fine: I was fully funded for both years, lived in a cheap apartment, and had a terrific group of friends who supported each other through it. I had a wonderful advisor, Susan Ware, who is a prolific writer. She taught me how to shape a long piece of work, so the book revision was also smooth. I love writing, and the dissertation process confirmed that.

You should try not to be involved in a lot of other things while writing your dissertation, if possible. Figure out the cheapest way to support yourself, don’t worry about it as a “book,” and accept imperfection in the interests of completion. Looking ahead to how hiring committees might perceive the dissertation is a huge distraction and bound to immobilize you. A done dissertation is the quickest way out of the indentured servitude of graduate study. But also: learn something about yourself. Do you like writing? If you don’t, this will be a problem. You should actively consider other kinds of work that require historical knowledge as you navigate this final exercise.

I also believe in Scrivener and Zotero.

(7) WHAT’S A TIME IN AN ACADEMIC CONFERENCE SETTING WHEN YOU’VE LAUGHED VERY HARD?

Every Berkshire Conference I’ve ever attended, the Little and the Bigs.

(8) WHAT ARE YOU MOST EXCITED FOR AT USIH 2019?

The podcast room, including my podcast Exiles on 12^th Street, which is a production of our web journal, Public Seminar. I’m both excited and nervous for our first live recording. Our topic is The News, and I can promise terrific guests. I’m also thrilled to have a great, multi-generational organization come to The New School. Our History Department will be accepting MA candidates, and we’ll have a bunch of us on site to discuss how everything we’ve said in the interview in terms of careers is baked into our program.