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.
L. Benjamin Roslky is an affiliated fellow at the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University, and a history teacher at Christian Brothers Academy in Lincroft, New Jersey. His work has appeared in a variety of academic and popular venues, including the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, The Los Angeles Review of Books, CNN Opinion, and The Washington Post. His research and teaching interests include religion and politics, popular culture, and critical theory. Rolsky’s book, The Rise and Fall of the Religious Left: Politics, Television, and Popular Culture in the 1970s and Beyond, was published by Columbia University Press in 2019. Rolsky is currently researching a project that will explore the history and theory of conservative mobilization and its relationship to various forms of mass media in general, and direct mail marketing in particular. You can follow him on Twitter: @LBRolsky. Read on to learn more about his scholarship and his plans as a USIH-IUPUI Community Scholar:“Studies of the American right-wing have been part of the larger study of American conservatism since at least America’s mid-century. In 1955, historian Richard Hofstadter and sociologist Daniel Bell edited The Radical Right to study this very phenomenon. The collection was the first of its kind: an academic volume exploring various aspects of ‘the radical right’ as defined by mid-century social scientists and American historians. Such intellectual parameters were necessary in the study of the American right, but they have not been sufficient in explaining the last decade of political and cultural turmoil- especially since 2016. If anything, contemporary studies have resuscitated the intellectual fascination with the relationship between the conservative mainstream, and the ever-encroaching radical fringe. Due to such analytical tendencies, studies of conservative media and its various ecologies have been woefully under attended to, and under theorized, in favor of studies of the extremes.
This project establishes an alternative intellectual trajectory for the study of American conservatism that moves beyond questions of status anxiety and deprivation in favor of more affective questions and sharper lines of interdisciplinary analytical inquiry. I foreground what one study calls the ’empire of direct mail’ in order to illustrate how conservative ideas blended with facts and hyperbole in the name of persuasive copy and electoral aspiration. In particular, I explore the intimate relationship between three interrelated but underexplored phenomena in the history of American conservatism: ideation, sublimation, and dissemination. In this sense, the project explores the myriad ways in which direct mail functioned as a unique communicative genre that forged novel connections between disparate conservative communities by drawing on feelings of resentment and discontent. As such, the argument casts American conservatism less as a movement or party, as cultural historian Lisa Szefel has recently suggested, and more as ‘a sensibility, temperament, and mentality.’”
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