Robert Westbrook
Professor
363 Rush Rhees Library
Rochester, New York 14627-0070
rwbk@mail.rochester.edu
phone: 585.275.9349
fax: 585.756.4425
Ph.D., Stanford University, 1981
Courses Offered
(subject to change)
Fall 2009
On Leave
Spring 2010
HIS 148: Recent America, 1929-Present
HIS 337W/437: American Culture in the Great Depression and WWII
Fields of Interest
Modern intellectual, cultural, and political history.
My scholarly concerns--at their broadest--lie in the study of Western modernity, that is, the course of European and American history since the mid-seventeenth century. But my principal research interest for some years has been in American political culture. Underlying much of my work here is a concern with the relationships among democratic ideals, liberal theory, and practical politics. As an intellectual historian of this theme, I have focused on the history of philosophical pragmatism, publishing an intellectual biography of John Dewey, as well as Democratic Hope, a study of the political implications of pragmatism and neo-pragmatism. As a cultural historian of liberal democracy, my published work has centered on popular political theory and the social history of the American moral imagination--evident, I claim, in documents such as Betty Grable pin-ups and Norman Rockwell paintings. Much of my writing here has centered on World War II, about which I have written one book and am finishing another.
As this summary suggests, I am not at all uneasy about moving back and forth across the supposed divides between high and popular culture, between intellectual and cultural history. This indifference to such roadblocks is reflected in the courses I teach, as well as my writing. These diverse interests are reflected as well in the dissertations I have advised. Of late, I have done some further boundary-crossing. Interested in the way in which intellectuals both transcribe and transgress conventional national identities, I have undertaken teaching some European history. One of the things I value most in the traditions of the history department here at the University of Rochester is the commitment to extending the public sphere in which historians practice their craft beyond the confines of a narrowly circumscribed professional and academic realm. History here has long been a form of social and cultural criticism. My own interventions in matters of overt public moment have of late been concentrated in the pages of The Christian Century, Raritan, and Commonweal. I am also on the steering committee of the History and Democracy Project, a collaborative effort to enliven the historical sensibilities of the American left.
Representative Publications:
- Rethinking the Good War: World War II and the American Moral Imagination (forthcoming).
- Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth ( 2005).
- Why We Fought: Forging American Obligations in World War II (2004).
- John Dewey and American Democracy (1991).
I have provided links to many of my other publications on my cv, and have deposited some unpublished work at UR Research.
