Spotlight/Insight: USIH Prize Winners Reflect–Katrina Forrester

Welcome to a year of REVOLUTION & REFORM! As we kick off our conversation, we’re delighted to honor the scholarship of Katrina Forrester (Harvard University), who won this year’s S-USIH Book Prize for In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (Princeton University Press, 2019). Read her thoughts on what’s new in intellectual history, and then join us tonight at 7pm EST via Zoom for a FREE roundtable dialogue with the author on her work. Panelists include: Andrew Hartman (Illinois State University), Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Joel Isaac (University of Chicago), Guy Emerson Mount (Auburn University), and Kevin M. Schultz (University of Illinois-Chicago). You can register here, and check out our full lineup of #USIH2020 webinars and publications here.

What are you working on now?

My new project is about feminist theories of work, in particular about socialist feminist thought in the long 1970s. I’m interested in how feminists grappled with deindustrialization, how they imagined ways to reorganize and transcend the spaces of home and work, and how they developed new theories of political action to do so. The project will inevitably have a US-focused component, but at the moment I’ve found myself writing mostly about British radicalism and feminism—how the Race Today Collective thought about the struggles of nurses on strike, for example, and how the feminist groups that came out of the Conference of Socialist Economists reconceptualized the labor process. I’m interested in what we can learn from their theories of work but also their strategies for transforming it. As we try to make sense of work in the pandemic, I’ve found that there is no better tradition to think with (and that’s true of both their innovations and their limits).

Within our field of intellectual history, what topics or approaches are you excited about?

I’ve learnt a huge amount from the new African American intellectual history in recent years—intellectual histories of Black feminism, Black internationalism, Black Power, and, really all the work coming out of AAIHS. The Law and Political Economy Project is also offering compelling frameworks for research at the intersection of US intellectual history and legal history. And I think work being done at the crossover of the political history of capitalism, history of technology and economics, intellectual history, and labor history continues to be fruitful. It’s exciting to watch intellectual history becoming a feature of so many distinct historical approaches and taking up a place at the center rather than the edge of the discipline.

This year, our annual meeting theme is “Revolution and Reform.” Can you reflect on how those ideas connect to your scholarship? 

My first book might be characterized as a history of how a broadly reformist vision of political change came to dominate political philosophy, squeezing out more revolutionary theories. At the moment, I’m more interested in ideas from a broadly revolutionary tradition that challenge easy binaries of reform and revolution. My new work looks at two traditions of revolutionary feminism—a revolutionary utopian tradition, and a revolutionary reformist one—both of which offer ways of thinking about political change that go beyond the revolution/reform dichotomy (for instance, about how to formulate “non-reformist reforms”). It’s a great theme for the meeting—I’m excited to attend the panels!