Governance

Recent Executive Committee Minutes:

S-USIH Executive Committee Meeting Minutes 2024-09-25

S-USIH Executive Committee Meeting Minutes 2024-08-21

S-USIH Executive Committee Meeting Minutes 2024-06-25

S-USIH Executive Committee Meeting Minutes 2024-04-30

S-USIH Executive Committee Meeting Minutes 2024-03-27

ARCHIVE OF MINUTES, AGENDAS, & MISC., 2011-2022

Current S-USIH Officers

Sara Georgini, PResident

A native of Brooklyn, New York, Sara earned her Ph.D. in History from Boston University in 2016. She is Series Editor of The Papers of John Adams, part of The Adams Papers editorial project at the Massachusetts Historical Society, and author of Household Gods: The Religious Lives of the Adams Family (Oxford University Press, 2019). She has worked on the selection, annotation, indexing, and book production of nearly 20 scholarly editions drawn from the Adams Papers (Harvard University Press, 2009— ). Her research focuses on early American thought, culture, and religion. She is a co-founder and contributor to The Junto, as well as a S-USIH Blogger and a frequent Smithsonian contributor. Her current public history project, in process here, is “A Woman’s Work,” a new collective biography of early American women intellectuals. Follow: @sarageorgini.

Sarah Payne, Treasurer

Sarah Payne is an associate professor of History at Colorado State University. Her research and teaching are in public history and environmental history, with a specialty in cultural resource management and historic preservation. She has served as the principal investigator on dozens of externally funded projects for federal and state agencies, local governments, and non-profit organizations, including numerous administrative histories for the National Park Service. Her current manuscript project Screwing with Nature: An Environmental History of Birth Control in the United States explores the production, consumption, and disposal histories of contraceptives in the twentieth century.

Katherine Jewell, Chair of Publications

Katherine Rye Jewell is the author of the first national history of college radio in the United States. Her work examines the intersection of cultural politics, popular music, the regulatory state, and universities and public media. Her award-winning book, Live from the Underground: A History of College Radio (UNC Press, 2023), unearths the origins of the beloved yet often understood medium of college radio. Known for launching bands such as Nirvana, R.E.M., and U2 to superstardom, it also functioned as a crossroads for shifting public expectations of colleges and universities in the 1980s and 1990s. This research builds on her experience as a political historian interested in how region and culture shape the implementation of policy, captured in her first book, Dollars for Dixie: Business and the Transformation of Conservatism in the Twentieth Century. She is currently working on a book about universities and their publics, including how they crafted educational radio to manage publicity, public service, and public access to these democratically informed institutions. She is a professor of history at Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts.

SARAH BRIDGER, SECRETARY

Sarah Bridger is an associate professor of history at the California Polytechnic State University. Her research focuses on intellectual history and the history of science and scientists in the twentieth-century United States, with a particular emphasis on competing visions of politics, economics, and ethics in times of social upheaval. She is the author of Scientists at War: The Ethics of Cold War Weapons Research (Harvard University Press, 2015), which was a co-winner of the S-USIH book prize. She is currently at work on a history of American scientists in the 1970s as they debated what counts as science and who counts as a scientist.

RAYMOND HABERSKI, JR., Administrative Officer

Raymond Haberski, Jr. is Professor of History and Director of American Studies at IUPUI. The American Studies program offers a unique applied doctorate that leverages research centers and external partners for a theoretically rich, experientially vibrant experience. For the 2008–2009 academic year he held the Fulbright Danish Distinguished Chair in American Studies. He helped found and still helps to run the Society for U.S. Intellectual History. Haberski’s books include It’s Only a Movie: Films and Critics in American Culture (2001), Freedom to Offend: How New York Remade Movie Culture (2007), The Miracle Case: Film Censorship and the Supreme Court(2008), God and War: American Civil Religion Since 1945 (2012), the forthcoming in 2018, Voice of Empathy: A History of Franciscan Media in the United States distributed by Catholic University Press and published by the American Academy of Franciscan History entitled. He is the co-editor of two other books: with Andrew Hartman, No Things but in Ideas: U.S. Intellectual History; and with Philip Goff and Rhys Williams, Beyond Bellah: Essays on American Civil Religion in the Twenty-First Century. Currently he is working on a monograph that looks at the U.S. Catholic Bishops’ pastoral letter The Challenge of Peace as a reflection of American use of just war theory and a second project on the social history of the American blockbuster film.

In May 2015, the Executive Committee formally established this position and appointed Haberski to facilitate the relationship between the Society for U.S. Intellectual History and the institution (i.e. IUPUI) that supports specific operations important to the work of the society. The position is defined below and will be added to the bylaws of the society:

Appointed position with a term decided by the executive committee; serves at the pleasure of the president of the society
Non-voting membership to the executive committee—invited to give reports and answer questions
Responsible for providing a mailing address for society business
With the approval of the executive committee, carries out society business with the institution that has agreed to provide specific kinds of support to the society
Seeks and applies for funding through the institution to help support the work of the society
Helps executive committee officers fulfill their duties as described in the society’s constitution

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Conference Co-CHairs 2026

Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

Daniel G. Hummel serves as the director of the Lumen Center, an initiative of the SL Brown Foundation in Madison, WI. He also holds the position of honorary research fellow in the History Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dan is the author of The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle Over the End Times Shaped a Nation (Eerdmans Press, 2023) and Covenant Brothers: Evangelicals, Jews, and U.S.-Israeli Relations (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). His writings on religion, politics, and foreign policy have appeared in outlets such as the Washington Post, Christianity Today, The Spectator, Comment, and Religion News Service. Additionally, his scholarly work has been published in Religion & American Culture and Church History.