This is a continuation of an earlier series of Spotlight/Insight reflections from winners of S-USIH book and article prizes. The earlier contributions can be found here, here, here , here, and here. As we all make the push to research and write during the summer, we here at the Society of U.S. Intellectual Historians hope this will provide all of you with food for thought for your own projects and tasks. Above all, we also hope you continue to take care of yourselves and your loved ones during these trying times.
Today, the S-USIH book prize series returns with an interview with Eran Zelnik, a cultural historian of the early United States. He is also a blogger for the Society of U.S. Intellectual Historians, and won the 
Dorothy Ross Award in 2019 for his article, “Yankees, Doodles, Fops, and Cuckolds: Compromised Manhood and Provincialism in the Revolutionary Period, 1740-1781,” Early American Studies.
Eran Zelnik: After taking some time to work on a couple of article projects (one of which I managed to publish, and one that I didn’t yet), I am now back to working on my book project tentatively titled “Republic of Mirth: Settler-Humor and the Making of White Man’s Democracy, 1750-1850.” It is a cultural history of how American settlers devised and employed humor and mirth in ways that helped forge the bonds of nationhood. It uses this broad umbrella to explain and link diverse practices as blackface, “playing Indian,” and riot and revelry during the Revolutionary era.
Within our field of intellectual history, what topics or approaches are you excited about?
Eran Zelnik: As you can see from my book project I’m particularly interested in connecting cultural history with settler-colonial theory. So that’s certainly something that I have been very invested in personally. Otherwise, I am excited about recent work on the intellectual history of race and nation. Actually I have a forthcoming article that examines the increasingly converging historiographies of race and nation.
This year, our annual meeting theme is “Revolution and Reform.” Can you reflect on how those ideas connect to your scholarship?
Eran Zelnik: Broadly speaking my scholarship examines how Americans disciplined the borders of the body politic in the wake of the Revolution, so in some ways Revolution and Reform strikes at the heart of my work. I approach the Revolutionary and Early Republic eras as dialectical, on the one hand evincing considerable democratic developments, but on the other hand–and in conjunction with these very democratic sensibilities–they also increasingly disciplined the body politic around whiteness and manhood. So yeah, revolution and at the same time the reformation of the basic assumptions that underscore the political compact that became the United States.
One Thought on this Post
S-USIH Comment Policy
We ask that those who participate in the discussions generated in the Comments section do so with the same decorum as they would in any other academic setting or context. Since the USIH bloggers write under our real names, we would prefer that our commenters also identify themselves by their real name. As our primary goal is to stimulate and engage in fruitful and productive discussion, ad hominem attacks (personal or professional), unnecessary insults, and/or mean-spiritedness have no place in the USIH Blog’s Comments section. Therefore, we reserve the right to remove any comments that contain any of the above and/or are not intended to further the discussion of the topic of the post. We welcome suggestions for corrections to any of our posts. As the official blog of the Society of US Intellectual History, we hope to foster a diverse community of scholars and readers who engage with one another in discussions of US intellectual history, broadly understood.
Love the book project, Eran! Your projects smells a lot like a Warren Susman-inspired work of historical synthesis. Aside: I’ve been doing some side work on humor in medicine, for my med students but also as a potential future blog post (on MASH).
Otherwise, this year’s conference feels tailor-made for your research and writing. – TL