This year’s conference will be held November 7-10, 2019, on The New School’s campus in New York City’s historic Greenwich Village neighborhood. The program is available here: S-USIH Program2019
Our theme for the 2019 conference is “Intellectual Traditions of Protest, Power, and Patriotism.” We interpret this theme broadly to include topics that engage the history of science, culture, politics, race, gender, government, society, education, literature, and a wide range of other fields covering all time periods and various events in U.S. history. In addition, the year of 2019 presents opportunities to consider several specific and ongoing anniversaries: 100 years since the signing of the Peace of Versailles and since the founding of The New School, home to thinkers such as John Dewey, Hannah Arendt, Gerda Lerner, and the University in Exile; 50 years since Richard Nixon called for the “silent majority” to rally in support of the GOP, since Tinker v. Des Moines guaranteed schoolchildren First Amendment rights, and since Students for a Democratic Society seized a Harvard administration building; and 150 years since the founding of the National Women’s Suffrage Association in New York State.
We are thrilled to announce our two keynote speakers: Martha Jones and Claire Bond Potter.
Martha S. Jones is Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University, and a distinguished legal and cultural historian whose interests include the study of race, law, citizenship, slavery, and the rights of women. She is the author of All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture 1830-1900 (University of North Carolina Press, 2007) and Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and a co-editor of Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (University of North Carolina Press, 2015). Professor Jones’s essays and commentary have appeared in the Washington Post, the Chronicle of Higher Education, CNN, and the Detroit Free Press, among other news outlets.
Claire Bond Potter is Professor of History at the New School and the Executive Editor of Public Seminar, a digital magazine of politics and culture, and her research spans United States political history after 1970, the history of gender and sexuality, mass culture, media and internet Studies. Potter is currently writing a book called Political Junkies from Talk Radio to Twitter: How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy, under contract to Basic Books, and is the author or editor of several more: War on Crime: Bandits, G-Men and the Politics of Mass Culture (Rutgers University Press, 1998), and with Renee Romano, Historians on Hamilton: How a Blockbuster Musical is Restaging America’s Past (Rutgers University Press, 2018) and Doing Recent History: On Privacy, Copyright, Video Games, Institutional Review Boards, Activist Scholarship, and History That Talks Back (University of Georgia Press, 2012). Professor Potter writes about history for a broad public: she is the creator of the Tenured Radical blog, and contributes frequently to outlets such as Dissent, The Village Voice, Inside Higher Education,Jacobin, and the Washington Post.
There will be plenary panels and sessions throughout the conference, including S-USIH’s first-ever “Podcast Stage,” featuring a live recording of podcasts, and a plenary discussion about publishing intellectual history. We are also pleased to announce that the African-American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) will have a robust presence at the 2019 conference, sponsoring five panels. We are also glad to continue our longstanding partnership with the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy (SAAP), which will be sponsoring one panel.
S-USIH is grateful for the support of The New School Centennial Committee, Eugene Lang College, the New School for Social Research, the Committee on Historical Studies, the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, Public Seminar, the History Channel, and Hostos Community College.
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