Welcome to our inaugural group of USIH-IUPUI Community Scholars! In partnership with the Institute for American Thought at IUPUI, we are proud to host such a fantastic array of scholars studying diverse aspects of the field. Please join us in welcoming our USIH-IUPUI Community Scholars: Cari S. Babitzke, Matthew Guariglia, Zachary Jacobson, Drew Maciag, L. Benjamin Rolsky, Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, and Rick Townsend. We’ll be introducing you to a new Community Scholar daily, so please stay tuned right here for their research finds and updates.
Drew Maciag earned his Ph.D. in History from the University of Rochester. He has held full-time visiting teaching positions at Nazareth College and the State University of New York College at Geneseo. He is the author of Edmund Burke in America: The Contested Career of the Father of Modern Conservatism (Cornell, 2013). His scholarship lies at the intersection of intellectual history and political culture. He has presented at several S-USIH conferences, contributed to the blog, and served on the book prize committee. Read on to learn more about Drew’s scholarship and his plans as a USIH-IUPUI Community Scholar:
“I am researching a book project entitled: ‘Sex and Gender on the New Frontier: Manhood, Modernity, and Milquetoast Feminism in John F. Kennedy’s Presidency.’ The project investigates JFK’s womanizing, and analyzes his opinions of women as sex objects, companions, functionaries, sisters, wives, mothers, voters, and (rarely) as influential, powerful, responsible figures. The book then examines Kennedy’s conceptions of, and his behavior regarding, manhood or masculinity. This combines elements of classical elite masculinity, which is essentially European in origin, and contemporary “cool-modern” masculinity, which is blatantly American, modern, and intertwined with popular culture and mass media. Although centered on JFK, the gender and sexual assumptions, attitudes, and actions of his political and social associates (including his wife Jacqueline and other “Kennedy women”) are included, and the broader social-sexual sensibility of the early 1960s is explored. The book also investigates the tentative, unintentionally provocative steps taken by Kennedy’s administration to address issues concerning American women. These steps were most prominent in his Presidential Commission on the Status of Women, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, which reported on the legislative and administrative steps required to improve women’s opportunities, yet stopped short of more daring and controversial reassessments of “traditional” gender roles. All of this activity is set within the context of the modernization of society, which was a primary concern of the New Frontier, and which is so retrospectively (or nostalgically) characteristic of the early 1960s.”
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